The Evolution of the Mind

Chapter 11 The Evolution of the Mind

From having recognized the new era of noogenesis in the history of evolution, we are obliged to distinguish a new ‘thinking layer’ spreading out on top of the plant and animal world. Over and beyond the biosphere there is the noosphere. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin e now come to humanity’s 5,000-year struggle to make sense of the world we live in, to understand what it truly means to be a human being and our place in the W overall scheme of things, particularly our relationship to God, the Universe, and each other. It has been a struggle because during all these millennia of noogenesis, evolution has not given us a sound conceptual foundation, framework, or context within which to conduct our learning activities, preventing us from soundly grounding our learning on the Truth. Until the last two decades of the second millennium, we did not have a consistent, equalitar- ian way of forming concepts that would enable us to build a coherent body of knowledge that corresponds to all our experiences from the mundane to the mystical. It is only with the benefit of hindsight, standing at the Omega point of evolution, that we can fully see what has been happening to humanity during this tumultuous period in evolutionary history. None of our ancestors, inexorably being guided towards evolution’s glorious culmination, had a full understanding of what was going on in them and the world around them. Yet we base our own learning on what our less than fully conscious antecedents have been passing on for generation after generation. As Alfred North Whitehead famously said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.1 In such a way, among many others, we hold on tenaciously to our traditions rather than adapting to our rapidly changing times. Of course, this conservatism puts humanity in a pretty perilous predicament, which we look at in Chapter 12, ‘The 783 784 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Crisis of the Mind’ on page 989 and Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1027. A central issue here is that while the mind has been evolving, it has become ever more dominant—in the form of the intellect—often stultifying and occluding our innate Intelli- gence. Academia is particularly prone to this disease, not the least because academic specialization has led universities to contravene the root meaning of university, which is ‘turned into one whole’. But more generally, when the fragmented mind becomes separated from our Di- vine Source, it is inclined to anxiety and delusion, which causes much havoc in the world. As the result of the evolution of the analytical, egoic mind, the biological species Homo sapiens has evolved into a noetic one, which we can simply call Homo divisionis. However, not everyone during the past five thousand years followed this path. A tiny minority, who we can call mystics, gnostics, and jnanis, remained as Homo divinus, knowing what it truly means to be a divine human being. This generally happened through meditation, contemplation, or self-inquiry, leading to the quiescence, even the annihilation of the mind.2 But while these mystics continued to live in union with the Divine, which is our True Nature, to do so they generally became separated from the world at large. So neither of these traditional approaches truly leads to Wholeness. In one, the mind is the master, while in the other, the mind is ex- tinguished, eradicated.3 But there is a middle way, the way of Homo divinus universalis, in which the intellect becomes the servant of self-reflective Intelligence rather than the other way round. This is of the utmost importance, for while we are slaves to our egoic minds, human societies cannot possibly function in a harmonious, peaceful manner, a utopian vision that we look at in Chapter 14, ‘The Age of Light’ on page 1131. In the meantime, let us take a peek at how the mind has evolved since the dawn of history, when our ancestors first created written symbols for the languages they were speaking. As with every application of Integral Relational Logic, this chapter just highlights the major mile- stones of development, which we can use as pillars to go into as much detail as we wish. It is in this way that we can get a feeling of wholeness for the entire history of human evolution. For then the details, described in thousands and millions of books, become less significant. It is only when we see the Big Picture that the minutiae make sense. For then we can see the entire forest and not be distracted by the trees. There are several ways of creating a framework for this study. For instance, in studying the twenty-odd civilizations that have existed during the patriarchal epoch, Arnold Toynbee divided these into three parts, primary, secondary, and tertiary, covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas.4 We show maps of the approximate locations of these civilizations, including the Americas, even though these have had comparatively little influence on the world as it exists today. These are the primary Mayan and Andean civilizations and the secondary Mexic and CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 785 Yucatec ones, with prophecies based on the Mayan calendar much exciting the New Age movement. It is interesting to note that civilizations in the noosphere have some similarities to species in the biosphere. Both emerge by a minority of individuals evolving in a new direction from their parents, when phylogeny of both species and civilizations recapitulates ontogeny, rather than the other way round. For when we are born into a particular civilization, people normally adapt the customs and beliefs of their natal culture. It is in this conservative way that civilizations maintain themselves, a situation that has become critical at these times of unprecedented rates of evolutionary change. We could therefore call Homo divisionis Homo civitas, a Latin word meaning ‘citizenship, union of citizens, state’. Then the members of each species would be Homo civitas x, where x could be Latin Aegyptus for members of the long-lasting Egyptian civilization, from the Greek Aíguptos. But this could get pretty heavy and not add much in understanding to where we are today. For we are all interdependent on each other, as the banking crisis in 2007 and 2008 showed quite clearly. So in practice, we are all members of Homo civitas mundanus or simply Homo mundanus, for mundanus in Latin means ‘a citizen of the world’.5 From the perspective of how the patriarchal epoch emerged in Europe, the Middle East, and India, the study of Indo-European languages, spoken by about half the world’s population, indicate that several civilizations had a common ancestor, which we explore a little. From here we can then focus attention on Western civilization, which dominates the world today through the rapidly disintegrating global economy. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell divides his study into three books, called ‘Ancient Philosophy’, ‘Catholic Philosophy’, and ‘Modern Philosophy’. This is how Russell describes his approach to writing this book: When I wish to write a book on a subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole, with all its parts duly interrelated. After that, I only have to write down what I have seen. The nearest analogy is first walking over a mountain in a mist, until every path and ridge and valley is separately familiar, and then, from a distance, seeing the mountain whole and clear in bright sunshine.6 This has some similarities to the approach that I have been taking in writing Wholeness. But, for me, when the Totality of Existence is vividly seen as a coherent whole in the blazing light of Consciousness, there is less need to follow all the paths in the mountains. They all dissolve into seamless, borderless Wholeness, quite exquisitely beautiful. From this solid foundation, we can then see the details in their true perspective, as the manifestation of the wondrous variety of forms of life, as beautiful art forms, and as a multitude of forms and structures that we need to deal with the practicalities of daily life, both as individuals and as a species. 786 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY In a similar manner to Russell, Parts I, III, and V in Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind are called ‘The Greek World View’, ‘The Christian World View’, and ‘The Modern World View’. Parts II, IV, and VI are then concerned with the transformation of these world-views, the last leading to the postmodern mind, which dominates intellectual thinking today. Here is Richard’s own approach to the massive task he set himself: A book that explores the evolution of the Western mind places special demands on both reader and writer, for it asks us to enter into frames of reference that are sometimes radically different from our own. Such a book invites a certain intellectual flexibility—a sympathetic metaphysical imagination, a capacity for viewing the world through the eyes of men and women from other times. One must in a sense wipe the slate clean, attempt to see things without the benefit or burden of a preconceived outlook.7 From the perspective of Wholeness, which begins afresh at the very beginning, without any preconceptions, as Chapter 1 on page 35 describes, the True Nature of all of us is Wholeness. So all religious scriptures, philosophical schools of thought, scientific theories, and economic ideologies are simply expressions of Wholeness. So when we look at the history of ideas, we can often see people’s intuitive sense of Wholeness, even though it was too early in human phylogeny for them to fully rationalize their experiences. As this chapter is about the evolution of the mind, we can adapt these various frameworks to focus attention on the two principal axial periods in noogenesis, from about 600 to 300 BCE and from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is amazing to see that nearly everything that influences the rational mind today was learned during two periods totalling less than a 1,000 years. But this is simply an illustration of the S-shape of the growth curve, which we explored in Subsection ‘The growth curve’ in Chapter 6, ‘A Holistic Theory of Evolution’ on page 538. The second and fourth sections of this chapter look at little at these two axial periods, on pages 818 and 883, respectively. Section ‘The dawn of history’ on page 787 reviews the early millennia of human learning, where we can see much influence from the preceding epoch of gods and goddesses, which continued throughout the patriarchal epoch. Section ‘The Middle Ages’ on page 854 explores the the period between the two axial periods, when the two major religions that dominate the world today—Christianity and Islam—emerged. But this was also when Bodhidharma and Shankacharya lived, the founders of Zen and Advaita, respectively. It is these mystical teachings that can well show us the way into the Age of Spirit, the fourth stage in Teilhard’s four-stage model of evolution. It is most important here to make a clear distinction between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of spirituality, which we can call religion and mysticism, respectively. The former is primarily concerned with morality and helping those who are not yet mystics come to terms with mortality through various immortality symbols. Mystics, on the other hand, have realized CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 787 that our True Nature is not determined by our bodies or minds; they have consciously become one with the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share, knowing that what we call birth and death—of our bodies, civilizations, species, planets, or whatever—is just an illusion. Putting this another way, it is important to remember that the whole of human history, indeed the entire history of the Universe, is just a dream. We are all just actors in a movie, not real in an absolute sense. What this means is that if we are to return home to Paradise as a species, we can learn more from the esoteric branches of the Exoteric Esoteric major religions of the world, which form the basis for the per- Hinduism Advaita ennial wisdom, than from the organized religions, listed in Ta- Buddhism Zen ble 11.1. Buddhism, and to some extent, Hinduism, are the Confucianism Tao least exoteric of these religions, far less than the three monothe- Judaism Kabbala istic religions that arose in the Middle East. And Confucianism Christianity Gnosticism is more a social and political philosophy than a religion. It is in- Islam Sufism teresting to note here that all the esoteric branches still exist as Table 11.1: Major religions movements today except Gnosticism. All the monotheistic religions have done their best to prevent their followers from discovering the Truth, Christianity being the most successful in this respect. Furthermore, when studying human history, it is vitally important to remember that much of what has been passed on to us from generation to generation was developed when our ancestors were still in infancy and childhood, mapping concepts from our ontogeny on to human phylogeny. And while we can learn much from our children while they are still in their innate innocence, children generally do not have enough practice in the world to make sense of their experiences, from the mystical to the mundane. As it is with ontogeny, so it is with phylogeny. Our ancestors were living at times quite different from our own. If we are to intelligently adapt to the unprecedented rate of change we are experiencing today, as the fourteen billion-year history of evolution passes through its point of accumulation, we have no choice but to start afresh at the very beginning, free of the burden of the past, perhaps along the lines described in Chapter 1.

The dawn of history There are two central characteristics that mark the dawn of history. The first is that our ancestors began to settle in large communities of tens of thousands of inhabitants, which are most often called cities rather than towns, from Latin civitas ‘citizenship, union of citizens, state’ from civis ‘citizen’ rather than from Old Norse tun ‘enclosed space, village’.8 Secondly, in order to manage such a large population, the leaders needed to record some basic information about the products that were being produced. Writing emerged originally as a tool of 788 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY business and only later as a means of telling stories and of passing what we were learning on to others through space and time. We look at these two aspects in this section.

The birth of civilizations The map in Figure 11.1 shows the locations of what Arnold Toynbee called ‘the primary civilizations of the old world’.9 Actually Shang was not a civilization in his sense of the word, as the ‘?’ indicates, and neither was the Indus culture. To Toynbee, a civilization was a unit of historical study, each unit being a member of a species of societies each with similar patterns of growth and decay, which can be compared one to the other. Although he does not give a precise definition of civilization, he points out that civilizations have a certain unity: “In order to understand the parts we must first focus attention upon the whole, because this whole is the field of study that is intelligible in itself.”10 He is also at pains to point out that we should not think of this ‘unity of civilization’ as exclusively Western. Such a viewpoint is egocentric and parochial, not duly respecting the great contribution that all civilizations have made to the evolution of human culture.11

Figure 11.1: Primary civilizations in the old world Michael Wood, on the other hand, does provide the definition of civilization commonly used by anthropologists and archaeologists, which is a material one. As he says, “For them civilization means, literally, ‘life in cities’.”12 However, as he points out, “the moral and spiritual character of the world’s early civilizations was very diverse.” Nevertheless, their common markers in material terms are virtually universal: cities, bronze technology, writing, great cer- emonial buildings, temples, monumental art, hierarchies and class division, all sanctioned by CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 789 some form of law, and held together by organized military force.”13 Such was the birth of the patriarchal epoch. The one exception to this of Toynbee’s early civilizations was the Minoan, surviving as a Great Goddess culture well into the Bronze Age,14 maybe because it was based on an island, that of Crete. However, the other four civilizations in the Old World were also autochtho- nous, ‘sprung from the soil, indigenous, aboriginal’ from Greek autokhthon ‘sprung from the land itself’, from khthon ‘earth, soil’. Another common factor of these four Old-World civilizations is that they all arose on rivers, in a narrow band around 30 degrees latitude in the temperate zone of the northern hem- isphere.15 The Sumeric civilization arose in Mesopotamia, ‘the country between two rivers’, from the Greek mesos ‘middle’ and potamos ‘river’, the two rivers being the Tigris and Euphra- tes. The Egyptian civilization ran for 1,000 kilometres between dunes and cliffs, a narrow rib- bon of blue water and green fields on average only 10 kilometres wide, on either side of the Nile.16 The Indus culture was based around the Indus River and its tributaries in the Punjab and a now dried-up river called Hakra-Ghaggar, maybe the origin of Saraswati ‘river of lakes’,17 a lost river revered as a goddess, mentioned in the Rig Veda.18 (The name India is derived from Indus, which is derived from the Old Persian word Hindu, from Sanskrit Sind- hu, the historic local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the In- dians as Indoi, the people of the Indus.)19 And the Shang dynasty arose around the Yellow River in China. Of these civilizations, the Egyptian lasted by far the longest, beginning in the fourth millennium BCE with the first pharaohs. The word pharaoh derives from Egyptian per ’aa ‘great house’, originally the royal palace in ancient Egypt. The word came to be used as a synonym for the Egyptian king under the New Kingdom, starting in the 18th dynasty, 1539–1292 BCE. The Egyptians believed their pharaoh to be a god, identifying him with the sky god Horus and with the sun gods Re, Amon, and Aton. Even after death the pharaoh remained divine, becoming transformed into Osiris, the father of Horus and god of the dead, and passing on his sacred powers and position to the new pharaoh, his son.20 Thus the age of divine kings was born, although they weren’t all male in Egypt, as Cleopatra shows, reigning after the end of the Egyptian civilization, when the Greeks took over. Of course, as the True Nature of all beings in the Universe is Wholeness, all human beings are divine; we always have been and we always shall be. But our ancestors, living in the infancy of human phylogeny, did not know this. They neither understood their outer world nor their inner. But the inner must have been the most mysterious, as it still is to many today. They could feel the all-powerful Divine Presence, but could not really understand all its manifestations as they appeared in their daily lives. So they created a multitude of gods and god- 790 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY desses, projecting them out into the world, particularly on to those individuals who seemed to represent their own inner divine power, which they could not fully express. While the Sumeric civilization is generally regarded as the cradle of civilization, the Indus valley culture is at least as old, as has been revealed through recent discoveries, broadcast on BBC World in 2007 in a fascinating series called ‘The Story of India’. As the historian Mi- chael Wood told us, in the 1920s, the British archaeologist John Marshall discovered “a great city [at Harappa] on the scale of the urban centres of the Near East”.21 Along with discoveries at Mohenjo-Daro, also made in the 1920s, this Harappan culture consisted of over 2,000 major settlements, larger in area than Egypt and Mesopotamia or any other ancient civilization,22 shown in Figure 11.2.23 “The size of the civilization is estimated at anywhere between 2 million and 5 million people, although no one knows for sure.”24 “The largest city, Mohenjo- Daro, is now thought to have reached eighty thousand in population,”25 although Mu- hammed Hassan, Curator of Harappan Museum, estimated the population of Harappa at 200,000 at its height.26 These discoveries radically changed the Western view of the history of India, as Wood tells us. “Until the dig at Harappa, it had been widely believed in Europe that civilization in India was a foreign import, that it was the creation of the classical civilizations of the Mediterrane- an, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Near East, with a little help from their ancient predecessors in Egypt and Babylon.”27 Muhammed Hassan said that the Harappan culture began about 3,500 BCE, with its mature period lasting from 2,900 to 1,900 BCE.28 This is in keeping with the understanding of the Brahmin priests, who “had long asserted that their own civilization went back thousands of years”.29 Although this ancient Indus civilization had developed writing, shown in Figure 11.3,30 albeit still undecipherable, the origin of writing is generally considered to be in Mesopota- mia.What led to the development of writing in the Sumerian civilization at the end of the fourth millennium BCE was the need to keep accounts. While agricultural communities had been living there for thousands of years before, by this time, their sedentary and pastoral practices had become so efficient that they produced a surplus. In the region where both the wheel and potter’s wheel were invented, there was no need for everyone to spend all their time in the fields. So people began to gather in brick-built cities, one of which was Uruk (modern Erech), where the first writing was found, dating back to 3300 BCE, as illustrated in Fig- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 791

Figure 11.2: Extent of early Indus civilization 792 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ure 11.4. This is an “archaic Sumerian clay tablet of the Uruk III stratum detailing the allot- ment of malt to a number of people and with stock accounts of barley on the reverse”.31

Figure 11.3: Early Indus writing This move from rural to urban living is marked in the Judaic-Christian Bible by the story of the Garden of Eden,32 shown in Figure 11.5.33 The word eden is the Hebrew for ‘pleasure, delight’, probably from Akkadian edinu, borrowed from Sumerian edin ‘plain’, with a proto- Semitic root */dn ‘softness, tenderness; verdure’.34 The Garden of Eden was Paradise, “the wild, uncultivated grassland of the south, the natural landscape which lay outside the artificial landscape of the city.”35 The evolution of the mind had thus progressed from “a state of innocence and bliss to the present human condition of knowledge of sin, misery, and death”.36 It is not clear from the literature how people occupied themselves in these initial cities. But this transformation must have marked the beginning of the division of labour, leading to the fragmented, split mind, not one that is whole, healthy, and holy. Here then is the root cause of the mental illness that is pandemic today as schizophrenic, delusion- al, and obsessive disorders, to borrow some terms from DSM IV, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic Figure 11.4: Early Sumerian writing and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. Today, half the global population is living in urban areas larger than 500,000 inhabitants.37 How often can people living in the metropol- itan areas of Tokyo, Seoul, and Mexico city, each with a population of over twenty million,38 enjoy the Paradise of the few remaining regions of wilderness on Earth? Those of us who live in depths of the countryside are the privileged few. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 793 Now as people’s work began to specialize, developing more than people needed for themselves, they needed to trade with each other, exchanging goods and services. At first, they did so through bartering systems without the exchange of money. This works in very simple societies exchanging just a few commodities; in such societies, “the absence of a common standard of values is no great problem.”39 “Thus trading in three commodities gives rise at any one time to only three exchange rates and Figure 11.5: Mesopotamia: supposed four commodities to six possible rates.”40 As Glyn location of Garden of Eden Davies says in A History of Money, the general formula comes from combinatorial mathematics, where n is the number of commodities and r is the number of elements to be selected, in this case 2 for bi- lateral trading: n n! C = ------r ()nr– !r! So this general formula for barter transactions reduces to n(n-1)/2, the sum of all the numbers from 1 to n-1, for whenever a commodity is added, new exchange rates must be established with all other commodities. The formula tells us that 4,950 and 499,500 exchange rates would be needed to support a bartering system of 100 and 1,000 commodities, respectively.41 Apart from this, “if the owner of an orchard, having a surplus of apples, required boots he would need to find not simply a cobbler but a cobbler who wanted to purchase apples.”42 Even with money as a means of exchange, there is a bartering problem with over 200 different national currencies. “If these were each of equal importance then foreign exchange would in- volve arbitrage between some 20,000 different combinations.”43 However, a few leading currencies, the pound sterling in the nineteenth century, plus the American dollar, the Euro, and the Japanese yen, provide the basis of a common measure of international monetary values.44 We’ll come back to the critical subject of money later. But in the meantime, we can just note that Eden saw the first use of money, with the first bankers appearing in Babylonia some three thousand years ago.45 In this way Homo oeconomicus was born, “the root idea of the modern West”.46 As Michael Wood emphasizes, more than ninety-five percent of the writing found on Iraqi sites is economic texts: facts and figures, bills, accounts, inventories, measures of dates or barley, parcels of land down to every rod, pole, or perch. “Contrast that with the earliest Sanskrit (religious texts) or the Chinese oracle bones (shamanistic divination),” he pointedly says.47 There is still a chance that evolution could heal our fragmented minds, so that there is no longer a schism between the mystical and the mundane. We can still return Home to Para- 794 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY dise, recognizing Wholeness as our True Nature. And then, we shall not be engaged in bilat- eral economic relationships. Rather, we shall each of us be in a conscious relationship with the whole of society, a notion that is central to Michael Linton’s Local Exchange Trading Sys- tem (LETS). And then there will be no need for money in the form that it has evolved during the past 5,000 years, as we look at in Chapter 14, ‘The Age of Light’ on page 1131. For then Love will have conquered the fear that arises from separation from our Divine Source, most clearly manifested in money as the primary immortality symbol in society today.48

The evolution of writing The origin and development of writing systems tells us something about the evolution of the mind and of how the movement of peoples and their languages influenced each other. So let us take a brief look at this fascinating and complex subject, focusing attention on some of the influences that have led to the script used in this book. The main source of information for this subsection is what appears to be the standard reference in the field: The Blackwell Ency- lopedia of Writing Systems by Florian Coulmas, who has been a professor of sociolinguistics and general linguistics in Japan and Germany, respectively. But first, a couple of general points. The introduction of symbols for spoken language led to the clear distinction between concepts and the symbols that denote them, which represent or stand for a referent in the triangle of meaning, depicted in Figure 1.32 on page 126. But we should remember that all that we know cannot be expressed symbolically. As Ken Wilber described in the first of his many books on Consciousness, there are two modes of knowing, called in Taoism conventional knowledge and natural knowledge,49 which in this book are called symbolic knowledge and inner knowing, respectively. If we focus attention just on the former, there is a danger that we can become separate from our Immortal Ground of Being, losing our innate and profound sense of the Presence of the Divine, which is ineffable, quite impossible to express in words or other symbols. In Sanskrit, this lack of union with the Ab- solute is called avidja ‘ignorance’, a notion that does not exist in Western languages, based as they are on separation. Agnostic, as the opposite of gnostic, has a quite different meaning. Secondly, the development of writing systems enabled us human beings to explicitly communicate with each other through time and space, hiding the fact that we are constantly and implicitly communicating with all other beings in the depths of the ocean of Consciousness through what Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’.50 Time, which had been predominantly cyclic during the age of the Great Mother Goddess, became linear, with a past and a future, and history was born, from Greek istoria, from istorein ‘to inquire, search’, from istor ‘learned man’, from Proto-Indo-European base *weid- ‘to see’, also root of wise, vision, guide, and even penguin! We call the times before the birth of writing prehistoric. But as we showed in Chapter 8, ‘Limits of Technology’ on page 619, machines, like computers, function only CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 795 in the horizontal dimension of time, while we human beings also function in the Eternal Now, in the vertical dimension of time, as the creative power of Life constantly pours through us. To realize our True Nature as divine, cosmic beings, we thus need to be completely free of the past and future, of our personal, cultural, and collective conditioning. Although the symbols on the clay tablets at Uruk are generally considered to be early forms of writing, as expressions of spoken language, they were actually just another step on the way that our ancestors represented in their outer worlds what they could see with their inner eyes. For instance, ceramics and other artefacts have been found in Old Europe dating from between the seventh and fourth millennia BCE containing short sign sequences that may represent language. However, as no one knows anything about the language of this region of South-East Europe, “there is no general agreement as to whether the Vinča signs constitute writing proper or should be regarded as a form of pre-writing.”51 What a study of these early forms of writing seems to indicate is that they consisted of pictograms, visible signs representing meaning rather than the sounds of the language. Semantics thus came before phonographics or phonography, not to coin another word. We still use pictograms today; we see them as icons on the desktops of our computers and as signs at airports and railway stations. Table 11.2 shows a few pictograms found as glyphs in a couple of fonts on my computer: Y#EkË

Table 11.2: Modern pictograms 796 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY At a fairly early stage in the development of writing, pictograms became stylized, in what Coulmas calls pictographs, illustrated in Ta- ble 11.3.52 Then over time, they became further stylized into cuneiforms, from Latin cuneus ‘wedge’. This term, coined by Thomas Hyde of Oxford Universi- ty in 1700, refers to the wedge- shaped strokes on which cuneiform signs consist. “The writing tool was a pointed stylus cut from reed which left wedges of various orien- tations when impressed on wet clay.”53 Cuneiform was thus specif- Table 11.3: Early pictographs ically adapted to the writing surface on which it was applied. When the clay dried in the sun or was fired, these tablets had a very long life, which is why so many survive to the present day. Actually, the elements in these cuneiforms were one of just five types, illustrated in Table 11.4. From these basic elements, quite complex logograms could be created. Version 5.1 of the Unicode standard for cuneiform characters consists of 880 glyphs,54 some of which contain twenty-five or more elements. BACDE

Table 11.4: Basic cuneiform elements These basic elements were also used in the Babylonian sexagesimal system of counting, using a base of 60 rather than the 10 we use today, presumably because we have 10 fingers (including the thumbs) with which to count. This was basically a tallying symbology, the numbers 1 to 9 being represented by 1 to 9 of the first element above. The decades were then represented by 1 to 5 of the last element. By combining these groups, all numbers in the sexagesimal system could be represented except zero.55 So this numeral JG represented 4*10 + 5 = 45 and HFJG represented 59*60 + 45 = 3,585. To represent 10,807 = 3*602 + 7 they used a placeholder for the zero position, but did not recognize zero as a number, like this: KML.56 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 797 The Babylonians were brilliant mathematicians, far ahead of their times, especially in their pioneering astronomical studies. Even today, we use their sexagesimal system in measuring time and angles. An hour consists of 60 minutes, each of which consists of 60 seconds. Exactly the same terms are used to divide each degree in the 360 degrees of the circle into smaller angles, used particularly in measurements of latitude and longitude, but used more generally by Hipparchus in his trigonometric functions57 mentioned on page 857. Cuneiform scripts lasted some 3,000 years in the languages of the Middle East until the first alphabets appeared. Figure 11.6 shows a family tree of how these Semitic scripts evolved,58 illustrating that the rabic, Hebrew, and European alphabets had a common ancestor, just like the evolution of the species that we looked at in the previous chapter, with Phoe- nician and Aramaic looking like identical twins. Table 11.5 show the relationship between just five graphemes in these various languages, including Latin and Cyrillic. Two things are important to note here. First, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic are all consonant scripts, with graphemes for consonants not vowels. So the Hebrew word for God is the reading from right to left. These four consonants are transliterated as ,יהוה tetragrammaton YHWH or Yahweh, which becomes Jehovah in English.59 So when the Greek alphabet was formed, vowel values were assigned to Phoenician consonant letters, such as A and E, as in Table 11.5.60 Secondly, the Greek and Latin alphabets originally consisted only of majuscules, what are commonly called ‘upper case’ letters because in the days of manual typesetting these slugs were kept in an upper case, further from the typesetter, while the lower case letters or minuscules, which were more frequently used, were stored closer to hand.61 The combined use of majuscules and minuscules in a ‘dual alphabet’ came about between 796 and 804 CE during a period of reform in education in the reign of Charlemagne under the auspices of Alcuin of York. Alcuin introduced what is called the Car- oline minuscule during the Carolingian Renais- sance to standardize the many different ways that Latin was being written across Europe, most particularly to ensure that the written language corre- sponded to the way that Latin was being or should Figure 11.6: Evolution of alphabetic scripts be spoken.62 For during the previous few hundred years, Latin majuscules had evolved into a cursive form that was easier to write on parchment 798 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY and vellum than the rather rough papyrus. These handwritten forms then became transformed into a variety of uncials, which were to form the basis of the standardized minuscules. This reform was most successful, as we all know today. But it had unexpected consequences. The literati, who used this written script, were only a small part of the speech community, who continued to speak in a way that was familiar to them, in a wide variety of ways. “As a consequence, the gulf between spoken and written Latin, which the reform was intended to eliminate, widened and Latin was gradually reduced to a written language only.”63 This situation is an example of what is called ‘diglossia’, a divergence between the literary form of a language, regarded as classic or associated with religious significance, and its colloquial counterpart.64 It is also a reflection of the challenges facing any authority seeking spelling reform. The Swedish spelling reform of 1906 was highly successful. But the many attempts to reform English spelling have fallen on distinctly stony ground. In English, there is rampant polyva- lence in grapheme-phoneme relationships. “English spelling represents the 40 phonemes of the language in more than a 1,000 different ways.”65 What fun it is to have English as one’s native language!

Phoenician Hebrew Arabic Greek Latin Cyrillic Α α A a А аاא Æ Β β B b Б бبב È Γ γ C c Г гجג ö Δ δ D d Д дدד g Ε ε E e Е е ه ה Š Table 11.5: Development of alphabetic letters This sociolinguistic phenomenon reflects a much broader issue. We cannot resolve the great global crisis we all face today by systemic change without a radical transformation of consciousness going to the very depths of the individual, cultural, and collective psyche, arising from the grass roots. I have also spent a little time on this topic because it affects the way that this book is being written. There are a number of ways that majuscules are used to make a particular point. One of these is to capitalize the initial letter of words that denote the Absolute, such as God and Supreme Being. This book makes heavy use of this convention, capitalizing many words such as Love, Peace, Life, Freedom, Consciousness, Intelligence, Wholeness, and Truth, to distinguish these divine meanings from their mundane counterparts. These capitalized words denote the many ways that we can experience the effects of the Divine in our lives, which in earlier times CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 799 were called gods and goddesses. The English language is not rich enough in such words, so we need to import some others, such as the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, the gods of creation, destruction, and sustainability, respectively. But should this book ever be translated into other languages, this vitally important semantic distinction, which is occasionally used in the literature, would be lost in those languages that do not have a dual alphabet or do not have an alphabet at all, like Chinese. Even in Ger- man, this distinction would be lost for it is the convention in this language to capitalize all substantives. We haven’t said much about the Minoan civilization so far, despite the fact that it was a comparatively peaceful one, for reasons that we can discover through a study of writing scripts used on Crete and on mainland Greece, some of which were brilliantly deciphered by Mi- chael Ventris, an architect, assisted by John Chadwick, a classical Greek scholar, who tells the story of this amazing discovery on which this passage is based. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arthur Evans, searching for examples of writing on Crete, realized that civilization on the island was incomparably older than in Greece; even in the Late Bronze Age it was still more advanced66 (the palace at Knossos even had plumbing and running water as anyone visiting the site can see). Evans was able to discover three phases in the development of writing on Crete. In the earliest, dating about 2000–1650 BCE, the script consisted mainly of pictograms. During the next phase, from 1750 to 1450 BCE, the pictorial signs had been reduced to mere outlines, running in a line from left to right, which Evans called Linear A. At a later date, which is difficult to determine, Linear A was replaced by a modified form of the script, prosaically called Linear B.67 But how could these signs be interpreted? They were in an unfamiliar script and the language that they represented was unknown. Reading is only really possible when both the script and the language are known. When one or the other is known, it is often possible to decipher the script, as in the case of the Rosetta Stone found in 1799, written in both Egyptian and Greek, which enabled the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing to be deciphered. But in the cases of Linear A and B, both were unknown, a real challenge that baffled the experts for half a century. 800 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Ventris was not an expert, although he had an extraordinary gift for learning languages rapidly by ear.68 When still at school in 1936, he heard Ä mare Arthur Evans speak about the Minoan puzzle,69 which caught his inter- Å stallion est, which he then made a hobby along with his education and practice as an architect. But it was not until the early 1950s, after qualifying in his Ç wheat chosen profession, that he, or anyone else, had the opportunity of solving what was regarded as one of the most important mysteries in Greek É wool history. Until 1939, the only Linear B tablets that were known had been found Ñ spear at Knossos in Crete. Previously, a few thought that these finds were evidence of the spread of the Minoan empire on to the mainland. But just Ö chariot before the Second World War, a further 600 clay tablets were found at Ü wheel Pylos, located in the south-west of the Peloponnese peninsula, at the op- 70 posite end from Mycenae. Because of the war, these were not pub- á dish lished until 1951, which gave potential decoders much more material to work on. à urn Ventris, himself, was greatly helped by the earlier analytical work of two experts. Emmett Bennett, who was regarded as the world expert in the reading of Myce- naean texts, had collected together all the known Linear B graphemes, dividing them into two groups. The first were clearly ideograms, denoting a concept, from the Greek eidos ‘concept, idea’, a word that was also to form the basis of Plato’s absolutist theory of Forms and Ideas, which we look at later. Here are just a few of them, taken from the 123 glyphs defined for Linear B in Unicode.71 Notice the distinction between female and male animals, a pattern that is also seen with pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle. It was thus apparent that the clay tablets found at Knossos and Pylos were for the management of accounts, not unlike the tablets written in Mesopotamia a couple of millennia earlier. Bennett also numbered another 87 graphemes, which have the honour of being numbered from 10000 in hexadecimal in Unicode.72 These were too many to be alphabetic and too few to be logographic, like Chinese. So the assumption was that this set of graphemes was a syllabary, consisting of syllables of the form consonant-vowel or possibly isolated vowels. Linear B thus has some structural similarities with Japanese, consisting of Chinese characters, kanji, and two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.73 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 801 The second expert who made a valuable contribution to the decipherment of Linear B was -a -e -i -o -u Alice Kober, who surmised that the language un- - âäãåæ derlying the script was inflexional, using different ending to express grammatical forms. Was there d- çèéêë also a consistent way of denoting a plural and to distinguish genders, she asked. She made great j- ìí îï progress along these lines, but died in 1950, just too soon to see the results of her important pre- k- õð ñò ó paratory investigations.74 In 1951, Ventris then set about solving this m- ôùúûü puzzle by implicitly using Integral Relational Logic. As each grapheme in the syllabary is an en- n- ýþÿkl tity with two attributes—consonant and vowel— he set up a grid, which we can also call a table or p- mnÀÁÂ matrix, with possible vowels as columns and consonants as rows. (Table 11.6 is the main grid as it q- ÃÊËÌ is known today, after many years work by Ventris and his successors.) He then set out to group r- ÍÎÏÐÒ graphemes that seemed to have an ending vowel s- or a beginning consonant in common. After sev- ÓÔ Õhi eral months working in this way, he had a tenta- t- tive grouping of 57 graphemes, which made up jØÙÚÛ nearly 90% of the graphemes. To help with this w- work, he had also developed a distribution of the ÝÞ ßc graphemes, counting their frequency per mille. z- Eleven of the graphemes appeared over 30‰, de f four of them later turning out to be single vow- Table 11.6: Linear B syllables els.75 At this stage, he did not know which vowel or consonant was which. All he had was a tentative grouping of these phonemic elements. To match the graphemes to pairs of phonemes, Ventris then had the brilliant idea that repeating triplets of graphemes, which Kober had identified, were place names on Crete. He tested this idea out with Knossos and Amnisos, a nearby harbour town, and found a close correspondence with Greek phonetics. This was a great shock. Was it possible that Linear B was actually a script for an archaic form of Greek? None of the experts thought that this was possible. Ventris, himself, thought that the lan- 802 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY guage might be Etruscan, for it was known that the Etruscans in Italy had originated in the Aegean, although this language was, and still is, uninterpreted. To test this amazing hypothesis, Ventris then turned to the commodities listed in the accounts at both Knossos and Pylos. There he found a word that closed matched the word ko- riannon or koliandron in Greek, the spice ‘coriander’ in English. Continuing in this way, he found further matches with Greek in the inflexional endings of words and with other words in Greek, such as the word for total. In 1952, he thereby wrote a tentative Note to be sent out to the scholars of the world outlining his hypothesis that Linear B was Greek, although Ven- tris added a cautionary note, saying that sooner or later this hypothesis was likely to dissipate itself in absurdities.76 Nevertheless, so much evidence was mounting to dissolve these doubts that by the time Ventris made a radio broadcast on the BBC in June 1952, he was able to say, “During the last few weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the Knossos and Pylos tablets must, after all, be written in Greek—a difficult and archaic Greek, seeing that it is 500 years older than Homer and written in a rather abbreviated form, but Greek nevertheless.”77 Further confir- mation came in May 1953, when Ventris received a letter from Carl Blegen, who the year before had found more clay tablets at Pylos, which Blegen was able to interpret using Ventris’ grid.78 Much further work was needed, for in Ventris’ original paper about 10% of the grapheme- phoneme pairs turned out to be false and a further 35% matched only in consonant or vowel elements. But Ventris was not destined to work further on this project, for he was tragically killed in a car accident in 1956.79 It was left to John Chadwick, who helped Ventris with the niceties of archaic Greek, to publish a book on this wonderful piece of decipherment in 1958, which I read while still at school because I was interested in cryptology at the time. Little did I know that I would return to this stirring investigation fifty years later. The main reason why I have done so is that Greek is an Indo-European language, while it appears that the Minoan language, written in Linear A and still undeciphered, is not. Now such languages did not originate in Europe; they originated in the steppes of Russia, most probably north and west of the Black and Caspian Seas.80 The spread of IE languages into Europe, Anatolia, Iran, and India marks the movement of warring tribes into these regions. In many areas, such as the Minoan civilization on Crete, the comparatively peaceful matrifo- cal epoch became the war-mongering patriarchal epoch, with which we have been familiar for the past few thousand years. But as Riane Eisler says in her revelationary book, The Chalice and the Blade, it doesn’t have to be this way. “War and the ‘war of the sexes’ are neither divinely nor biologically or- dained,”81 as she says. A study of prehistory shows that it is quite possible for women and men to live in peace with each other. “The title The Chalice and the Blade derives from this cata- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 803 clysmic turning point during the prehistory of Western civilization, when the direction of our cultural evolution was quite literally turned around.”82 As she says, the Chalice symbolizes the time in prehistoric societies when men and women’s power to give and nurture was supreme. In contrast, when the power of the Blade is idealized, in which men and women are taught to equate masculinity with violence and domination, social systems develop a deep malaise.83 So can Life help us to cocreate the much longed-for peaceful society in which everyone on Earth has the opportunity to realize their fullest potential as divine, cosmic beings? Well, we can get a clue about how this could happen from the Devanagari script, the alphabet in which Sanskrit and modern Indian languages are written. For the root of devanagari comes from deva ‘divine, royal’ and nagari ‘of a city’, from nagaram ‘city’, probably of Dravidian origin. Deva itself has a Proto-Indo-European base *dyeu- ‘to shine’ (and in many derivatives ‘sky, heaven, god’), the root of Jove, the god of the bright sky, head of the Indo-European panthe- on, and hence Dyaus Pitar ‘sky father’ in Sanskrit, Zeus in Greek, Jupiter in Latin, and Tyr in Old Norse ‘sky god (and sadly of war)’, the root of Tuesday. Divine, deity, jovial, and journey ultimately also have the same base.84 So maybe we could adapt the Latin alphabet into one that could be used to unify the mystical and economic aspects of our lives, borrowing ideas from the East, if not its writing system. For here are just a few graphemes in Devanagari, which I have had great difficulty in making much sense of, especially when written small, as in a dictionary. The Devanagari script is one of many derived from Brahmi, which is thought to be another writing system derived from Semitic.85 abdgikmnprst अबडगइकमनपरसत Table 11.7: Some Devanagari characters used in Sanskrit Nevertheless, Devanagari reminds me of the final paragraph of To Have or To Be? “A new blueprint for Mankind”, in which Erich Fromm said, “If the City of God [of the late Medi- eval ages] and the Earthly City [of scientific and economic progress] were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis is the only alternative to chaos: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval world and the development of rational thought and science since the Renais- sance. This synthesis is The City of Being.”86

Our Indo-European inheritance Before we move on to the second phase in the development of civilizations, it is pertinent to take a peek at the Indo-European inheritance that is shared by some 50% of the population on Earth through their languages. We can best begin with an oft-quoted passage from a lec- 804 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ture that the philologer and jurist William Jones gave to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta on 2nd February 1786, published two years later: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.87 Jones was not the first to notice patterns of relationships between languages. Already in classical antiquity, it was noticed that Greek and Latin bore some striking similarities to each other, leading to the assumption that Latin had evolved from Greek. But no one suggested that Greek, Latin, and several other languages actually evolved from a common ancestor, no longer spoken. As Benjamin Forston says in Indo-European Language and Culture, “This was a turning point in the history of science.”88 After two centuries of further scientific study of the languages of the world, Figure 11.7 depicts the Indo-European family tree, showing the common ancestor of this vast family, whose ‘grandfather’ is called Proto-Indo-European CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 805 (PIE).89

Figure 11.7: Family tree of Indo-European languages Linguists say that languages that have evolved from a common ancestor are ‘genetically related’. But this does not mean that they have come about through mutations of the DNA molecule. As Forston says, “This technical term has nothing to do with biology; it makes no claims about the race or ancestry of the speakers of the languages in question, who may belong to many different ethnicities.”90 Thus a comprehensive theory of evolution, which embraces all types of developmental processes, whether they be physical, biological, or mental, must free itself from the shackles that Darwinism restrain us in, that inhibits us from being fully alive, vibrant, and creative. Languages evolve from each other or from a common ancestor in a variety of ways. Seman- tically, the most obvious is that similar words appear in many different languages. For instance, the word for father (fader in German) in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit is pater, pater, and pitar, respectively. And in more obscure European tongues, “the Sanskrit word for horse, as- va, is closely matched in Lithuanian by aszwa.”91 These examples show another way that languages evolve. Phonetically, linguists can see many regular patterns in the mutations of phonemes: consonants and vowels. For instance, “A sound change in a language that turns a p between vowels into b, say, will change every 806 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY intervocalic p in the language to b”. There are also many morphological patterns in the way that morphemes connect with each other, for instance, in the way that prefixes such as pre- and un-, and suffixes, such as -ing and -ness, are added to words in English. And syntactically, a language might evolve from another by changing the position of the verb in the sentence, for instance.92 Julius Pokorny collected all the lexical knowledge that had accumulated at his time on these evolutionary processes in Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ‘Indo-Eu- ropean Etymological Dictionary’, published in 1959, now the standard work of reference on the subject.93 The evolution of languages well illustrates the way that human ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, making subtle changes in the process, which can gradually lead to a new species of language spoken by a community, identified by religion or nationality, for instance. The phylogeny of the community has thus come about through the recapitulation of the ontogeny of those individuals who diverged from their parents. As Fortson says, “Contrary to popular wisdom, no one teaches children their native language.” In the first few years of life, children the world over construct their own individual grammar of the language, an invisible, underlying body of knowledge consisting of unconscious rules and principles.94 For the most part, children subconsciously mimic their parents and those around them, for they are not linguists, who have specialized in the scientific study of languages. This situation presents a great challenge to our species at the present time. Just as Homo sapiens is just a twig on the great Tree of Life, the mother tongues that each of us speaks are tiny branches on a variety of linguistic family trees. These divergent evolutionary processes, while giving us the great diversity of forms that we enjoy today, can inhibit the convergence of all these processes in Wholeness, not the least because the languages of the world reflect fragmented, deluded worldviews, often based on the seven pillars of unwisdom, misconcep- tions of God, Universe, Life, humanity, money, justice, and reason. It we are to evolve into a superconscious, superintelligent species, we need to transcend these linguistic divisions. In the case of the Indo-European languages, most estimates suggest that this evolutionary process has been taking place for about six thousand years from its Proto-Indo-European base. Figure 11.8 depicts a map of the geographical distribution of the major Indo-European CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 807 peoples around 500 BCE:95

Figure 11.8: Distribution of Indo-European languages around 500 BCE Marija Gimbutas coined the term Kurgan culture for the PIE culture in 1956 as a broader term than those previously used and because kurgan (barrow in Slavic and Turkic) has appropriate connotations of eastern origins.96 Figure 11.9 is a photo of tumuli typifying the Kurgan culture during the Chalcolithic and its Bronze and Iron Age manifestations in Europe and Asia.97

Figure 11.9: Kurgan tumuli Kurgan is the Russian word for a tumulus, a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood.98 The word was of Turkic origin, a language in the Altaic family group, which makes one wonder if the peaceful people of Shambhala became these 808 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY war-mongering peoples. As Riane Eisler tells us, “Ruled by powerful priests and warriors, they brought with them their male gods of war and mountains, [and …] gradually imposed their ideologies and ways of life on the lands and peoples they conquered.”99 Table 11.8 shows Gimbutas’ summary of the essential differences between Old Europe and the Kurgan culture that was to replace it:100 Old European culture Kurgan culture Economy Agricultural (without the horse), sedentary Pastoral (with horse) Large aggregates Habitat Small villages with semi-subterranean houses Villages and townships Social structure Egalitarian matrilinear society Patriarchal, patrilocal Peaceful, art-loving Warlike Ideology Woman creatress Man creator Table 11.8: Comparison of Kurgan and Old European cultures There were also distinctive differences in these two cultures’ belief in the afterlife. In Old Europe, “A strong belief in cyclic regeneration is reflected in Neolithic burial rites. The per- vasive idea in grave architecture is Tomb is Womb.” In Indo-European culture, on the other hand, “There is a linear continuity from this life to the afterlife. Therefore mortuary houses are built, and the dead take their belongings, tools, weapons, ornaments, according to rank, to the afterworld.”101 These cyclic and linear views of time were to be incorporated into the major religions’ immortality symbols for those who did not know that there is no death, that time is an illusion. In the East, these symbols were predominantly cyclic, with a belief in the everlasting reincarnation of a separate soul. And in the West, there is the widespread belief in eternal life after death. But what is eternity? Infinite time? As we showed on page 235 in Chapter 3, ‘Unifying Opposites’, there are an infinite number of infinite cardinals. So when people talk about eternity, which infinite cardinal do they mean? Through a meticulous study of radiocarbon dates in archaeological studies,102 Gimbutas has shown that the Indo-European languages spread through the migration of nomadic peoples in three phases called Kurgan waves: no. 1 at c. 4300–4200 BCE, no. 2 at c. 3400–3200 BCE, and no. 3 at c. 3000–2800 BCE.103 This included invasions into Syro-Palestine at the end of the third millennium BCE,104 although we do not have linguistic evidence for this today. However, the Middle East, between the Levant and Mesopotamia, was mostly unaffected by these great migrations from the north that took place during these millennia. Rather, the nomadic invaders in this region came from the deserts of the south, from the Arabian Peninsula, a Semitic people we call the Hebrews, invading Canaan, later named Pal- estine for the Philistines, one of the peoples who lived in the area. Like the Kurgans, these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests (the Levite tribe of Mo- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 809 ses, Aaron, and Joshua).105 The Semitic family of languages, which are a branch of an Afro-Asian family, today includes Arabic, Maltese, and Berber, and in ancient times Egyptian and Coptic.106 They naturally spread in a similar manner to the Indo-European family, appearing and dying like all forms of life. At the time depicted in the missing map, the principal languages in this region appear to have been Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Hebrew was the primary language of the Jewish Bible, with Aramaic being a secondary language, despite being the lingua franca of the region, the language that Jesus spoke. Arabic only began to appear around 200 BCE.

Further development of civilizations With this linguistic background, we can now take a brief look at the evolution of cultures and civilizations at this secondary period of development. It was during this period, from the middle of the second millennium BCE to around year zero, that papyrus and parchment became more widely available, making it possible to tell stories and write religious scriptures, which would not have been easy on the clay tablets used for accounting purposes. This period also marked the beginning of philosophy and science, which we look at in the next section, ‘The first axial period’. Here is Arnold Toynbee and Edward Myer’s map of these secondary civilizations in the Old World.107

Figure 11.10: Secondary civilizations in the old world This rather simplistic map of the principal civilizations doesn’t really illustrate the com- plexities of the cultures and empires that emerged during this period. This complexity is well 810 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY depicted in 115 pages of maps drawn by Toynbee and Myers covering the last 5,000 years.108 But under all this complexity, there is one simple observation that can be made: these civilizations marked the beginning of a deep schism between East and West, which did not begin to be healed until the twentieth century. Even a cursory study of the spiritual scriptures written in the first millennium BCE shows that East and West began to go in opposite directions with quite different worldviews. In the East, the focus of attention was to go inwards—to reunite with the Divine—and to look at the world from a both-and perspective. But in the West, the egoic mind became separated from the Divine, going more outwards than inwards with an either-or philosophy. Nevertheless, despite these differences, all the peoples at this time were struggling to make sense of their experiences and how they could live in love and peace with each other, despite the conflicts that were becoming ever more intense. For from the perspective of the entire phylogeny of humanity, our ancestors were still living at the infantile or childlike period of development. They could sense immense powers within and about them that they could not see, hear, touch, smell, or taste, but which were nevertheless very real to them. Given their immaturity at this comparatively early stage in human evolution, how could they possibly resolve all their difficulties? If we are to reach full maturity as human beings, we need to let go of the childish traditions of our ancestors and return to the innate innocence and wisdom of childhood. Most particularly, neither of the opposite perspectives of these early civilizations leads to Wholeness, the union of all opposites. So let us take a peek at how the schism between East and West came about, trusting that this might help a little to heal our split minds, necessary if we are to resolve the great global crisis we all face today as consciously and intelligently as possible.

Eastern civilizations There is a vast literature describing the origins and history of the Indic civilization and its spiritual foundation. Much of it was communicated orally for hundreds and thousands of years before it was written down. One might think that these stories might become distorted as they passed from one generation to another like in Chinese whispers. An apocryphal example of such a phenomenon from World War I is of a message being sent down the trench line, where “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” became “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”109 But apparently these scriptures avoided such corruption because they had such a poetic rhythm that even one syllable out of place would be immediately noticed. Archaeological studies during the last century or so are confirming the historicity of these myths and legends, although not in every detail, of course. For myself, I have focused my reading on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, for these texts most closely mirror my own mystical experiences. I have not found anything in the West CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 811 that corresponds to them. Upanishad derives from the Sanskrit upa ‘near’, ni ‘down’, and sad ‘sit’. So upanishad means ‘to sit down near to’ a guru to receive confidential, secret teaching.110 The Upanishads provide the mystical core of Vedanta, from the Sanskrit vedas ‘knowledge, sacred teaching’ and anta ‘end’ with a PIE base *ant- ‘front, forehead’. Wikipedia also suggests that anta could mean ‘essence’,111 which is most meaningful and beautiful, although I have not found corroboratory evidence for this assertion. We look at the Upanishads a little more when describing the birth of Advaita ‘not-two’ in the third section of this chapter. The story of Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita—‘the song of the Divine One’—has been a great inspiration to me on my spiritual journey through life, as I have battled against fear, delusion, prejudice, conservatism, and hostility. For even when we wish to live in Love and Peace, many are still moved by fight or flight in the dualistic world of form. As Krishna told Arjuna, we should not shrink from fighting for the Truth, as long as we stay grounded in Freedom—in unconditional love—a divine principle that inspired Mohandas Ghandi’s Satyagraha from Sanskrit satya ‘truth’ and agraha ‘great enthusiasm and interest’. As Figure 4.2 on page 250 in Chapter 4, ‘Transcending the Categories’ illustrates, Nonduality is the union of Nondual- ity and duality, a universal principle that the egoic, split mind cannot assimilate without being healed, the central theme of this book. The Bhagavad Gita forms the spiritual centre of the great epic poem The Mahabharata, one of two such epics about early Indian history, the other being Ramayana. A number of commentators have noted similarities between The Mahabharata and Homer’s The Iliad, both being stories of great battles involving gods and goddesses, although the former is eight times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined.112 These books thus marked the beginning of the world’s literature, of poetry and narratives. But the primary evidence for the Indo-European incursion into India comes from the Ve- das, particularly The Rig Veda, the oldest and most extensive of four Vedic texts that were to become the basic scriptures for Hinduism, a religion based on mythology, rather than the teachings of one particular founder, like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.113 The Rig Veda talks about the Aryans, an Indo-European tribe that invaded India, Aryan meaning ‘noble’, also the root of Iran and Eire, ‘lands of the Aryans’.114 (As The American Dictionary of the English Language comments, “It is one of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally referred to a people who looked vastly different.” Similarly, the term anti-Semitism, meaning ‘prejudice against or hostility toward Jews’, is a distortion of the word Semite, which really refers to speakers of the Semitic language group, which includes both Hebrew and Arabic, the languages of Jews and Muslims, respectively.) Be that as it may, the Rig Veda, which comprises about a thousand hymns, speaks of horses and wheeled chariots, which the indigenous peoples of the Indus valley did not have. Many 812 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY of these hymns also sing of the delights of soma, a sacred drink based on ephedra, a twiggy mountain plant not native to the Indus valley. As Michael Wood tells us, “When infused in boiling water, ephedra produces quite a powerful sensation of euphoria,” as he testifies in his fascinating television series on India.115 Wood then took us to an archeological dig in Turk- menistan, where Victor Sariandi had found not only horses and wheeled vehicles from about 1900 BCE, but also curved mud-brick fire altars of the type still used in Vedic rites in India.116 Before we attempt to interpret this evidence, we need to mention one other body of literature from these times called the Puranas, from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘ancient narratives’, of which there are eighteen, six each devoted to Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma.117 They consist of narratives of the history of the Universe from creation to destruction, genealogies of the kings, heroes, sages, and demigods, and descriptions of Hindu cosmology, philosophy, and geography.118 As such, they contain the Hindu version of creation story, not unlike the Jewish Torah, which similarly describes genealogies of the prophets going right back to Adam and Eve. But while Abraham was merely the great great great grandson of supposedly the first human beings, the Hindu sense of time, described in Subsection ‘The Hindu calendar’ in Chap- ter 6, ‘A Holistic Theory of Evolution’ on page 544, went back trillions of years, comparable only to the Mayan sense of the vastness of time. The entire corpus that underlies Hinduism consists of two great epic poems—The Mahab- harata and Ramayana—the four Vedas, eighteen Puranas, and 108 Upanishads, 108 being a holy number in India,119 perhaps because it has a nice pattern, being 11*22*33.120 I don’t know the total length of all these scriptures, but as just one Purana—Bhagavata Purana—is 608 pages in Penguin Classics, it is possible that this corpus is larger than the scriptures of all the other religions put together and maybe also older. But can all this literature tell us why Eastern religions developed in such a radically different way from Western ones? All the evidence indicates that the Aryans, an Indo-European tribe, invaded northern India, just as their cousins invaded Europe. And this seems to have happened in the first half of the second millennium BCE, when climate change drove the Ar- yans south-west and environmental collapse drove the Harappan culture into the Ganges valley. The Indic civilization was thus formed out of the union of the indigenous peoples of the Indus and the Aryans. On the surface, the Aryans brought with them their social structures: a basic three-tier division of society—priests, warriors, and farmers—with workers, servants, and slaves below them from the majority indigenous population. As Michael Wood suggests, “Here, perhaps, lies the root of the caste system.” Even today, “the majority of the underclass is descended from the aboriginal peoples.”121 So who were the Rishis who wrote the Rig Veda? Were they actually Indo-Aryans, a mixed race of the indigenous peoples and their conquerors? CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 813 But above all, who wrote this passage from the Katha Upanishad, a favourite in all ages, called ‘Death as a teacher’:122 Above the senses is the mind, Above the mind is the intellect, Above that is the ego, and above the ego Is the unmanifested Cause. And beyond is Brahman, omnipresent, Attributeless. Realizing him one is released From the cycle of birth and death.123 There are no myths of gods and goddesses here, just the pure, unadorned Truth. Whoever wrote this did not belong to a warrior class of priests. He or she, presumably he, had a most profound inner knowing of Reality, the like of which is not found in the exoteric scriptures of the monotheistic religions or in any scientific theories so far accepted. So right at the esoteric heart of Hinduism is a monotheistic worldview, one that is all-inclusive, not divisive. Don’t be fooled by all the gods and goddesses of the exoteric Vedas and other writings that have informed this powerful religion. It is the mystical Upanishads that truly mirror people’s deep inner knowing of the Divine.

Western civilizations If there is much uncertainty about the origins of Eastern spirituality, it is even more difficult to unravel the beginnings of the Western religions that dominate the world today and in whose names so many holy wars—wars about the Whole—have been fought. Figure 11.10 on page 809 shows two civilizations in the Middle East during this time, the Babylonic and the Syriac, in Mesopotamia and the Le- vant, respectively. But at the time of writing, it is by no means clear to me how these relate to the Assyrian Empire, which dominated the Fertile Crescent during some of this period. The principal reason for my ignorance on this subject is that it has had very little influence on my spiritual awaken- Figure 11.11: The Fertile Crescent ing and on my studies into the root cause of the accelerating pace of evolutionary change that we are experiencing today. Indeed, if we are to collectively move forward into an epoch of Love and Peace, the freer we are of the ancient beliefs that divide us from each other, and which have subconsciously been passed on from generation to generation for the past two or three millennia, the easier it will be for us all. 814 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY For this draft of this subsection, just a couple of points have caught my eye. Regarding the Syriac civilization, Toynbee says that it has three great feats to its credit. “It invented the Al- phabet; it discovered the Atlantic; and it arrived at a particular conception of God which is common to Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam but alien alike from the Egyp- tiac, Sumeric, Indic and Hellenic veins of religious thought.” 124The greatest of these three, surpassing the others as a feat of human prowess, was “the spiritual discovery of monotheism”.125 But while monotheism is a sound doctrine, the exoteric religions of the West have completely messed up this fundamental truth of Existence. Each believes in exclusivity, that their particular conception is the correct one, and that we human beings are constantly separate from the Divine, other than Jesus in Christianity. Yet, in Reality, the Divine as Conscious- ness, as Wholeness, is all-inclusive, the Truth that none of these religions acknowledges. They are all based firmly and squarely on the first pillar of unwisdom, the greatest tragedy in human history. At the heart of this problem is the Jewish belief that they are God’s chosen people, as this sentence indicates: “For you are a people consecrated to the LORD your God: the LORD your God chose you from among all other peoples on earth to be his treasured people,”126 or in the Christian translation, “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.”127 Such a hubristic belief is hardly conducive to making friends and influencing people. It is thus not surprising that the Jews have been particularly persecuted throughout human history. In ancient times, the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt before Moses took them out into the desert in what is called the Exodus and Nebuchadnezzar drove the Hebrews out of Israel into Babylonia, a story encapsulated in Verdi’s Nabucco, with its popular Hebrews’ chorus. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Babylonic civilization is that it laid down the foundation of astronomy, which was apparently inseparable from astrology for many centuries. They discovered that the three most conspicuous cycles that they familiar with from their daily lives—day and night, the lunar month, and the solar year—had their “counterpart in a recurrent birth and death of all things on the time-scale of the cosmic cycle”.128 As Toynbee says, “If an eclipse of the Sun or a transit of Venus could be dated to some precise moment hundreds of years back in the past, or predicted with equal certainty as bound to occur at some precise moment in the equally remote future, then was it not reasonable to assume that human affairs were just as rigidly fixed and just as accurately calculable?”129 Even today, this emphasis on deterministic prediction holds sway both in mechanistic science and its disparaged astrological counterpart. On this point, it is pertinent to clarify the root meaning of prophet in the Jewish Tanakh, which apparently means someone who makes CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 815 a prophecy, who foretells the future. But as Benjamin Fortson tells us, prophet derives from the Greek prophetes, from pro-, which could mean ‘from’, ‘before’, and ‘forth’, and phetes ‘say- er’, from phemi ‘I say’. And as he tells us from a study of the etymology of the word, “a ‘prophet’ was originally one who ‘spoke forth’ or ‘announced’ the will of the gods rather than one who foretold the future,”130 which explains why so few of the Old Testament prophets actually made prophecies. As we do not live in a deterministic Universe, but one in which Life is constantly creating and refreshing structures as they pass through their birth and death cycles in the Eternal Now, who among us can say anything about the future? All we can really say is that if we mecha- nistically assimilate the immature beliefs that our ancestors have been passing on from generation to generation for millennia, then humanity is not a viable species. We can only come fully alive as divine, cosmic human beings when we are free of the past, from our personal, cultural, and collective conditioning. It is only then that we can face the future without fear, knowing that all civilizations and species, including Western civilization and Homo sapiens, are born, grow, decay, and die. This is a universal principle that we deny at our peril.

Primitive economies As trade within and between civilizations developed, people found a need to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Such an issue had not been a problem for any previous species, whether they be flora or fauna. As Glyn Davies said, “The direct exchange of services and resources for mutual advantage is intrinsic to the symbiotic relationships between plants, insects and animals.”131 Our fellow species freely give and receive of themselves without any expec- tation of any return, for they are innately living in Wholeness, free of any sense that they are separate from any other beings, or the Cosmos, as a Whole. But as the egoic mind developed, our ancestors lost their innate sense of Wholeness, and began to see themselves as separate from those around them. Thus the concept of ownership was born, the belief that individuals and groups can own things or even ideas, as encapsulated in intellectual property laws, such as patent, copyright, and trademark. Such a notion is utterly absurd, for in Reality there are no separate beings anywhere in the Universe who can be said to own anything just as there is no doership, as Advaita sages such as Ramesh S. Balsekar, a late President of the Bank of India, teach. Thus began a deep split between the mundane and the mystical, with spiritual seekers, such as monks and nuns, often taking up a vow of poverty, while the majority focused their primary attention on trade. Today, our children’s health and well-being and even the survival of our species is dependent on us reconciling this pair of opposites. There is a theoretical solution to this problem by replacing money with meaning, meaningful information. While it is not possible to unify mysticism and money, per se, it is quite possible to unify mysticism 816 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY and meaning, as the Unified Relationships Theory shows with the utmost clarity. But it has to be said that the probability of applying the remedy is minuscule, far less than the 2% chance that Erich Fromm gave us of healing our grievously sick society.132 But while the probability is not actually zero, it is still worthwhile pursuing the ultimate goal. To help us in this pursuit, we need to understand something about the history of money and of how we have got ourselves into the mess that we are in today. We look at this extremely tricky and sensitive subject here and in the final subsection of the next three sections. It is also vitally important to remember that economics, like politics, physics, biology, and every other domain of study, is just a branch of psychology. All the structures we use to organize ideas and society are expressions of our minds. So if we are to make changes in our outer worlds, we can only begin with the inner. The first rudiments of money appeared as trading systems moved people away from Wholeness. Undoubtedly money is the most peculiar invention that the human mind has ever manifested, for it has many guises depending on which function or functions is or are being considered. In A History of Money, Davies lists ten of these, six related to microeconom- ics and four to macroeconomics.133 The most fundamental function is ‘Unit of account’, closely related to the second function ‘Common measure of value’, both functions being abstract. Money, as a unit, is thus similar to metres, grams, degrees, amperes, and many other units that we measure domains of values in. But what money is measuring is by no means clear. It is not anything in our physical world. There is no scientific standard for money, as there is for metres and kilograms, for instance, although some attempt was made during the ages to make gold a standard. Money, as a unit of account, is a purely arbitrary notion. It cannot even be said to have a sound mathematical foundation other than it is expressed numerically. To make monetary units more tangible, a way had to be found of using them as a measuring stick, just as rulers, scales, thermometers, and ammeters measure millimetres, grams, degrees, and amperes respectively. A vast multitude of different kinds of objects have been used as primitive money, including amber, beads, cowries, drums, eggs, feathers, gongs, hoes, ivory, jade, kettles, leather, mats, nails, oxen, pigs, quartz, rice, salt, thimbles, umiaks (boats used by Eskimo people), vodka, wampum, yarns, and zappozats (decorated axes).134 These commodities, along with the precious metals, such as gold and silver, and later base-metal coins, thus provide the next two concrete functions of money: ‘Medium of exchange’ and ‘Means of payment’. For an object to qualify as a form of money, it must satisfy a few fundamental principles. First, it must be available in sufficient numbers in the community, but, paradoxically, be of limited supply. An effectively infinite supply of objects, such as grains of sand, would not meet the requirements. Secondly, it should be reasonably durable during its period of usage. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 817 And thirdly, money, as an object, needs to be handy; objects that are too large or small are not suitable. Now once money, as an abstract measuring unit, becomes a commodity with value, it can be used for two other functions, one abstract, the other concrete: ‘Standard for deferred pay- ments’ and ‘Store of value’. These functions are what make money such a peculiar notion. As a store of value, money can be bought and sold like any other commodity, which happens every time we exchange one currency for another when we travel overseas. Yet, in essence, money is just a measuring stick. So when we buy and sell money as a commodity, we are effectively trading in units like centimetres and decilitres, an absurdity, which Michael Linton attempted to deal with in his Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), which we look at in the next chapter. As well as these specific microeconomic functions, Davies identifies four general macroe- conomic functions: ‘Liquid asset’, ‘Framework of the market allocative system (prices)’, ‘A causative factor in the economy’, and ‘Controller of the economy’.135 He also briefly defines economics as the logic of limited resource usage, money being the main method in which that logic is put to work.136 Therein lies a major cause of the great economic crisis we face today. As we saw in Chapter 8, ‘Limits of Technology’, while machines, like computers, are inherently limited, human beings have an infinite capacity for growth and development. So to treat the value of human beings in the same way as paper clips is dehumanizing. If humanity is to realize its fullest potential as a species, it is vital that we develop a meaningful information system to manage our limited resources while giving individuals every opportunity to become free of the constraints that lead us to behave more like machines than the cosmic, divine beings we truly are. And for this to happen, we need to recognize that money is not the primary causative factor in the economy, fear is. These fears arise through separation, through the false belief that we are separate from each other, Nature, and the Divine, fears that first arose many millennia ago. In particular, because we have become separate from our Immortal Ground of Being, money has become the primary immortality symbol, providing many with a precarious sense of security and identity in life. We look at this critical situation in the final two chapters. But in the meantime, we need to continue our brief review of how the evolution of the mind led us to where we are today and what we might learn from our ancestors that is relevant to our current difficulties.

First axial period In our brief review of the second wave of civilizations, we omitted the Sinic and Hellenic civilizations because they are best considered in the context of the amazing period of creativity that arose between 600 and 300 BCE, in what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the 818 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German), although, for him, this pivotal period lasted from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, 300 years either side of 500 BCE, which he calls the ‘axis of history’.137 We can now redress this omission and look at some further developments in the Indo-Aryan cultures. What seems to have brought about this great surge in the evolution of human consciousness is that the egoic mind had been struggling to develop for the previous few thousand years and had now got out of hand, leading to much conflict and suffering. The central issue here is that human beings are the least instinctive of all the animals. Virtually all our behaviour is determined by our learning. Using the metaphor of the stored-program computer, we are programmed to behave in certain ways. Our behaviour is not hard-wired; it is determined by the ‘software’, constantly being spontaneously fed by the creative power of Life. Today, because of the divergent way that the mind has evolved during the past two and a half thousand years, the egoic mind is even more out of hand than it was at the beginning of the first axial period. So let us see what we can learn from these intrepid pioneers to help us deal with the great psychospiritual, ecological, and economic crisis we face today. Foremost among these spiritual innovators were Siddhartha Gautama (563–483 BCE), Lao Tzu, a mythical figure who supposedly lived in the sixth century BCE, Heraclitus (535–475 BCE), the mystical philosopher of change, and Parmenides (c. 520-c. 450 BCE), a major influence on Plato’s philosophy. Some also faced the challenge of how to create a harmonious society, foremost among them being Confucius (551–479 BCE), Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), and Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE). In philosophy, including metaphysics, and in science, Pythag- oras (born between 580 and 572 BCE, died between 500 and 490 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were two other giants of the times. Mahavira (599–527 BCE) and Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Latinized Greek) (c. 628–c. 551 BCE) also had a significant influence during these times as the founders of Jainism and Zoroastrianism, respectively. And we should not forget about Eu- clid (323–283 BCE), who systematized the mathematical ideas known at his time, building on Aristotle’s either-or, linear logic and laying down the principles of mathematical proof, which would be shattered by Kurt Gödel in 1931. So why did these pioneering individuals, whose cultures had comparatively little contact with each other, emerge on Earth at more or less the same time? Well, the Unified Relation- ships Theory offers two possible explanations for this phenomenon. First, the True Nature of every being in the Universe is Consciousness. All beings are related to all others through space and time, never separate for a single moment from the Divine. The notion of past lives arises from this fundamental principle of existence; we are all One. Secondly, the Universe is extremely well ordered; similar patterns appear everywhere we look, albeit in different guises. In the abstract, we all face essentially the same issues in life, both as individuals and as a species, not the least that we are all destined to die. And at the beginning of the axial period, all civilizations and cultures were facing the problem of how a CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 819 society driven by the egoic mind could live harmoniously in Love and Peace, free of conflict and suffering. Many solutions have been devised through the ages. So let us look briefly at a few of these original ideas, especially the ones that have relevance to us today.

The birth of Buddhism Undoubtedly the greatest discovery that Shakyamuni Buddha made is the trilakshana, the three marks of being: there are no permanent structures in the Universe (anitya) and if people do not recognize this fundamental truth of existence by becoming free of attachment to the sense of a separate self (anatman), they will suffer (duhkha). The universal principle of imper- manence is even more relevant today than it was in the Buddha’s time for evolution is currently passing through its point of accumulation, as we saw in Subsection ‘A systems perspective’ in Chapter 6, ‘A Holistic Theory of Evolution’ on page 559, the most momentous change in some fourteen billion years of start-stop development. Yet we are not changing. In 2009, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America with the slogan ‘Change we can believe in’. But he inherited an un- workable system, which requires such radical changes that they are quite unbelievable to most. Humanity is not a viable species without a revolutionary transformation of consciousness, which requires a fundamental reassessment of what we mean by the work ethic, which we look at in Chapter 14, ‘The Age of Light’ on page 1131. It is of the utmost importance that we cocreate a safe and accepting environment where people have the opportunity for self-inquiry, to look inwards, free of the constant need to provide cannon fodder for the economic machine. Yet Obama’s top priority, laid out in his acceptance speech on 5th November 2008, is to get people back to work so that they can earn a living. This is particularly critical in the state of Michigan, the centre of the automobile industry in the USA, whose governor Jennifer Granholm said shortly after the election that some 10% of the workforce in the USA is dependent on this industry.138 But how much longer can this state of affairs continue now that we are running out of oil to power these cars? Can the many alternatives being proposed really maintain individuals’ ability to drive about anywhere they might choose? Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha—the enlightened or awakened one—was a prince born in Shakya, a province in Northern India, in what is now Nepal. Gautama was his family name, Siddhartha, his given name, meaning ‘the one who accomplishes his aim’.139 He was later was given the epithet Shakyamuni, meaning ‘sage of the shakya clan’. At birth, the sages told his father King Suddhodana that his son would become a great leader, either a mighty emperor or great Teacher.140 As Thich Nhat Hanh tells us in his delightful biography, Suddhodana preferred the former, and did his best to steer his son in this direction. 820 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY However, as Siddhartha grew up, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the conventional teachings of the Vedas, of the materialism and uncaring power of the brahmans, and of the corruption of the courtiers in the court, feigning virtue and morality.141 He also became increasingly aware of people’s suffering, of poverty, disease, and death. So after getting married and having a son, he left his family and set out to discover the root cause of suffering, becoming a forest ascetic, like many other monks at that time. After five years practising meditation, he still hadn’t found the path of liberation and so set out on a practice of extreme self-mortification, which led his body to become utterly ema- ciated. Then one day, he realized with a jolt how wrong the path of self-mortification was. The body and mind cannot be separated; to abuse the body is to abuse the mind.142 In a state of utter exhaustion, a thirteen-year-old girl called Sujata found him and gave him some milk to drink.143 The monk Gautama then abandoned all reliance on tradition and scripture in order to find the Way on his own. He entered the final six months of his search sitting beneath a pippala tree, seeing within each leaf the contents of the Universe and the interconnectedness of all things.144 While sitting there, he went beyond the idea of atman, as expounded in the Vedas. With a start, he realized that in Reality all things are without a separate self. Nonself or Anatman is the essential nature of all existence.145 Just to clarify this vitally important point, Siddharta also heard and read the Upanishads when he was growing up. And in this esoteric text, a distinction is made between Atman ‘the true, supraindividual Self’ and jivatman ‘individual soul’, from Sanskrit jiv ‘to live in the body’.146 So there really is no conflict between what were to become the religions of Buddhism and Hinduism. While jivatman is just maya, part of the illusory world of form, Anatman in Buddhism is the union of Atman and Brahman in esoteric Hinduism. So Buddhism is not really atheistic, as some people say. Shunyata ‘Emptiness’, the Divine Essence of the Universe, is just one aspect of the Divine, which we can also call Love, which leads to the Buddhist emphasis on compassion. After this realization, those around Siddharta Gautama saw that he had become the ‘Awakened One’ by following a ‘Path of Awareness’. Now awaken in Magadi, the Indo-Aryan language that it is supposed that Siddharta spoke, is bodh. In this way, he became known as the Buddha and the pippala was called the Bodhi tree, from the same root.147 But now we come across a dilemma in Buddhism, as in all the religions. Shakyamuni Bud- dha set out to teach what he had learnt, with his four Noble Truths, eight-fold path, and five precepts for laypersons and hundreds of precepts for monks and nuns, as described in Section ‘Returning Home to Oneness’ in Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1081. But the Buddha did not actually follow all these teachings in his own search; they came after- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 821 wards. What really matters here is the experience, not the Way, for as J. Krishnamurti famously said in 1929 when dissolving the organization that wanted to make him a world teacher, ‘Truth is a pathless land’ and you cannot organize the Truth.148 While there is cause and effect within the world of form, as when we kick a ball, there is no cause that awakens us to our True Nature, for that is who we truly are at every moment of our lives, even though it might take many years to realize this vital Truth.

Chinese axial figures We now come to the neglected Chinese, who seem to have developed in their own unique way, perhaps because of their isolation from the other early civilizations. While the Sumerians were focused on trade and the Indians on mysticism, early Chinese culture was more based on divination. The Chinese sensed that everything is in constant change and that change is caused by energies over which they had no control. They were also to maintain their innate sense of Wholeness as the mind began to evolve, being guided by the Principle of Unity— Wholeness is the union of all opposites—the fundamental design principle of the Universe. In this way they were able to live in harmony with the Cosmos to a far greater extent than modern Chinese do today. Nevertheless, they still needed to find a way of making sense of their lives. To this end, they created a Book of Changes, known as I Ching, a collection of linear signs used as oracles, which had been used everywhere since antiquity. Richard Wilhelm tells us in his famous translation (into German) of I Ching that traditionally these oracles were confined to answers ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I Ching began in this way, with an unbroken line (⚊) denoting ‘Yes’ and a broken line (⚋) ‘No’.149 These lines also represent yin-yang, with yang being unbroken, depicted in traditional and simplified Chinese with these signs, respectively: 陰陽 and 阴阳 . Yin and yang are often associated with female and male and with dark and light, respectively. However, as Wilhelm tells us, “the need for greater differentiation seems to have been felt at an early date, and the single lines were combined in pairs,” the lower line being more significant: ⚌ ⚍ ⚎ ⚏ Greater yang Lesser yang Lesser yin Greater yin Seeking even greater differentiation, a third line was added to form a system of eight trigrams, which “were conceived as images of all that happens in heaven and on earth. … The eight trigrams are symbols standing for transitional states … [they] therefore are not representations of things as such but of their tendencies in movement.” The trigrams were given various names and characteristics, as in Table 11.9, with some of their attributes in 822 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY IRL terms. Sign Name Characteristic Image Family relationship ☰ Ch’ien quán 乾 the Creative strong heaven father ☳ Chên zhèn 震 the Arousing inciting movement thunder first son ☵ K’an kăn 坎 the Abysmal dangerous water second son ☶ Kên gèn 艮 Keeping still resting mountain third son ☷ K’un kūn 坤 the Receptive devoted, yielding earth mother ☴ Sun xùn 巽 the Gentle penetrating wind, wood first daughter ☲ Li li 離 the Clinging light-giving fire second daughter ☱ Tui duì 兌 the Joyous joyful lake third daughter Table 11.9: Attributes of trigrams One point of interest here is that the Chinese logograms have not changed in thousands of years. Chinese writing systems did not evolve like those in other civilizations. The Chinese did not develop an alphabet or even a syllabic system of writing, as the Japanese did. It might seem strange that the sons should have just one creative line and two receptive lines, yang and yin or light and dark, respectively. Wilhelm explains that this is because the light trigrams for the sons have one ruler and two subjects, “the way of the superior man”,150 a clear sign of ubiquitous patriarchy. However, the Chinese did not stop there. To achieve still greater multiplicity, they combined the trigrams to form 64 (26) hexagrams. As Hellmut Wilhelm, Richard’s son, tells us, “The system of existence and events underlying the Book of Changes lays claim to completeness. The book attempts a correlation of situations in life in all strata, personal and collective, and in all dimensions. An added feature of the system are the trends of development latent within the various situations and their reciprocal relations.”151 Each line in each of the sixty-four hexagrams, either positive or negative, is capable of change to its opposite, a central notion in Chinese philosophy encapsulated in the classic T’ai- chi-t’u symbol, or ‘Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate’, reproduced in Figure 3.6 on page 232 in Chapter 3, ‘Unifying Opposites’. Figure 11.12 depicts the hexagrams in their natural order in a circle and square, this arrangement being ascribed to Fû-hsi.152 Table 11.10 also depicts CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 823 the hexagrams in their natural sequence in the first column, with the opposites in the other column, with Wilhelm’s translations of the archetypes.

Figure 11.12: The I Ching hexagrams, arranged in a circle and square, in their natural sequence However, the sequence actually used for divination in I Ching was devised by To show the effects of the relationships of the trigrams, Peace, on line 8, represents complete harmony, when the Receptive, which moves downward, stands above, while the Crea- tive, which moves upward, is below. In this manner, all living things bloom and prosper, as in the spring.153 On the other hand, in its opposite, Standstill or Stagnation, Heaven is above, 824 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Sign Wilhelm Chinese Translit Sign Wilhelm Chinese Translit ䷀ The Creative 乾 Ch’ien ䷁ The Receptive 坤 K’un Return (The Turning ䷫ Coming to Meet 姤 Kou ䷗ 復 Fu Point) ䷌ Fellowship with Men 同人 T’ung Jên ䷆ The Army 師 Shih ䷠ Retreat 遯 Tun ䷒ Approach 臨 Lin ䷉ Treading [Conduct] 履 Lu ䷎ Modesty 謙 Ch’ien ䷅ Conflict 訟 Sung ䷣ Darkening of the Light 明夷 Ming I Innocence (The Unexpect- ䷘ 無妄 Wu Wang ䷭ Pushing Upward 升 Shêng ed) ䷋ Standstill [Stagnation] 否 P’i ䷊ Peace 泰 T’ai The Taming Power of the Hsiao ䷈ 小畜 ䷏ Enthusiasm 豫 Yu Small Ch’u The Gentle (The Penetrat- The Arousing (Shock, ䷸ 巽 Sun ䷲ 震 Chên ing, Wind) Thunder) ䷤ The Family [The Clan] 家人 Chia Jên ䷧ Deliverance 解 Hsieh Development (Gradual Pro- ䷴ 漸 Chien ䷵ The Marrying Maiden 歸妹 Kuei Mei gress) Preponderance of the ䷼ Inner Truth 中孚 Chung Fu ䷽ 小過 Hsiao Kuo Small ䷺ Dispersion [Dissolution] 渙 Huan ䷶ Abundance [Fullness] 豐 Fêng ䷩ Increase 益 I ䷟ Duration 恆 Hêng The Power of the ䷓ Contemplation (View) 觀 Kuan ䷡ 大壯 Ta Chuang Great Holding Together ䷍ Possession in Great Measure 大有 Ta Yu ䷇ 比 Pi [Union] Difficulty at the Begin- ䷱ The Cauldron 鼎 Ting ䷂ 屯 Chun ning ䷝ The Clinging, Fire 離 Li ䷜ The Abysmal (Water) 坎 K’an ䷷ The Wanderer 旅 Lu ䷻ Limitation 節 Chieh ䷥ Opposition 睽 K’uei ䷦ Obstruction 蹇 Chien ䷿ Before Completion 未濟 Wei Chi ䷾ After Completion 既濟 Chi Chi ䷔ Biting Through 噬嗑 Shih Ho ䷯ The Well 井 Ching Table 11.10: Attributes of hexagrams in I Ching CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 825 Sign Wilhelm Chinese Translit Sign Wilhelm Chinese Translit Waiting (Nourish- ䷢ Progress 晉 Chin ䷄ 需 Hsu ment) The Taming Power of the Gathering Together ䷙ 大畜 Ta Ch’u ䷬ 萃 Ts’ui Great [Massing] Work on What Has Been ䷑ 蠱 Ku ䷐ Following 隨 Sui Spoiled [Decay] Oppression (Exhaus- ䷕ Grace 賁 Pi ䷮ 困 K’un tion) ䷳ Keeping Still, Mountain 艮 Kên ䷹ The Joyous, Lake 兌 Tui ䷨ Decrease 損 Sun ䷞ Influence (Wooing) 咸 Hsien ䷃ Youthful Folly 蒙 Mêng ䷰ Revolution (Moulting) 革 Ko The Corners of the Mouth Preponderance of the ䷚ 頤 I ䷛ 大過 Ta Kuo (Providing Nourishment) Great Break-through (Reso- ䷖ Splitting Apart 剝 Po ䷪ 夬 Kuai luteness) Table 11.10: Attributes of hexagrams in I Ching drawing farther and farther away, while the earth below sinks farther into the depths. This hexagram thus represents a time of decline, as in the autumn.154 How then was the oracle consulted at any given moment? Well, traditionally, this followed a rather intricate ritual for selecting each of the lines in the hexagram through the manipula- tion of forty-nine yarrow stalks. These were chosen because they are products of the vegetable kingdom, related to the Divine Source of Life. But not all individuals were equally fitted to consult the oracle. It required “a clear and tranquil mind, receptive to the cosmic influences hidden in the humble divining stalks”.155 Here is Wilhelm’s explanation of this complex procedure. One takes fifty yarrow stalks, of which only forty-nine are used. These forty-nine are first divided into two heaps [at random], then a stalk from the right-hand heap is inserted between the ring finger and the little finger of the left hand. The left heap is counted through by fours, and the remainder (four or less) is inserted between the ring finger and the middle finger. The same thing is done with the right heap, and the remainder inserted between the forefinger and the middle finger. This constitutes one change. Now one is holding in one’s hand either five or nine stalks in all. The two remaining heaps are put together, and the same process is repeated twice. These second and third times, one obtains either four or eight stalks. The five stalks of the first counting and the four of each of the succeeding countings are regarded as a unit having the numerical value three; the nine stalks of the first counting and the eight of the succeeding countings have the numerical value two. When three successive changes produce the sum 3+3+3=9, this makes the old yang, i.e., a firm line that moves. The sum 2+2+2=6 makes old yin, a yielding line that moves. Seven is the young yang, and eight the young yin; they are 826 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY not taken into account as individual lines.156 It was in this way that each of the six lines in the hexagram was chosen, moving upwards. But not only were the yin or yang of the lines being chosen, whether they were moving or at rest was also significant. If one line was in movement, it would be related to the corresponding hexagram in which just that one line changed. For instance, 8, 6, 7, 7, 8, 7 would generate ䷷, which changes into ䷱. The lines marked by 7 or 8 are at rest and are not considered individually. In the table of hexagrams above, all six lines, considered individually, change into their polar opposite. Any one casting of the yarrow stalks can thus generate 4096 (64*64) different possibilities, ‘representing every possible situation on earth’. Ta Chuan then goes on to say: It [the oracle] reveals tao and renders nature and action divine. Therefore with its help we can meet everything in the right way, and with its help can even assist the gods themselves.157 Curiously, even though the ritual of the yarrow stalks is supposedly random, each of the four possibilities is not equally likely. Old yang (9), old yin (6), young yang (7), and young yin (8) have the probabilities of 3/16, 1/16, 5/16, and 7/16, respectively.158 So while each hexagram is equally possible, the chance of a positive creative line changing is three times greater than a negative receptive line, which seems to make some sort of sense. Writing the foreword to Wilhelm’s translation of I Ching, Carl Jung pointed out that the Chinese view of causality was quite different from the West’s mechanistic chain of cause and effect in the horizontal dimension of time. A central point here is that the Chinese did not look at apparently chance events in isolation. As Jung said, “the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its inception.”159 And as he said in Synchronicity, “The method, like all divinatory or intuitive techniques, is based on an acausal or synchronistic connective principle,”160 notions that have their parallels in quantum physics, as Fritjof Capra pointed out in his best-selling The Tao of Physics.161 Nor is this all. As the hexagram is a way of grasping the total situation at any moment, it also provides a “method for exploring the unconscious”.162 As Jung also said, “According to the old tradition, it is ‘spiritual agencies’, acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer.”163 Using the hexagrams as an oracle in which the future could be divined was thus just one way of using them. The Book of Changes could also be used as a book of wisdom, providing people with moral guidance on how to behave. With this preamble on the workings of the Chinese mind, we now come to a pair of opposites that seems to be unique in the entire history of civilizations. The I Ching deeply influenced both Confucius and Lao Tzu, focusing attention on the outer and inner aspects of our lives, respectively.164 The Taoism of Lao Tzu was not seen as an alternative to Confucian- ism, but as complementary, necessary to maintain balance and harmony in life. As Michael Wood tells us, “it was said that the complete person was a Confucian by day (in public life) CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 827 and a Taoist by night (in private).”165 But why separate night and day? Such a dualism cannot help us adapt intelligently and consciously to the unprecedented rate of evolutionary change we are experiencing today. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to note how the Chinese, being both- and thinkers, dealt with the challenges of life during the first axial period. As Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins tell us, “Confucius, like the Buddha, was moved by the plight of the people around him, but rather than prescribe any form of philosophical escape or transcendence, he urged participation is society and human improve- ment.”166 Thus the Western ideas of individualism, the free market economy, and everyone for themselves were anathema to Confucius. As we are all one, the notion that we are independent of each other is antisocial, not conducive to the development of a harmonious society. Furthermore, Confucius was particularly concerned with language, for words have ideals built into them, not unlike Plato’s notion of Forms and Ideas. So to call someone a ‘leader’, for instance, is not a description but a prescription of the values and actions that should determine that person’s behaviour.167 To do otherwise is hypocritical. The central concepts of Confucius’ philosophy were thus jen ‘humaneness, love of fellow men’ and li ‘morality, uprightness, custom’,168 often expressed as virtue and ritual. “Confu- cius’ vision then was of a moral society bound together by mutual respect and trust,”169 of which the fundamental unit was the family. And though he was an aristocrat, like Plato, his vision “was in a sense an anti-authoritarian idea because the control of the ideology would rest with the scholars”,170 not unlike Plato’s notion of philosopher-kings. But admirable as these principles are, unless they are grounded in mysticism and the Truth, they cannot fully provide guidance on how our grievously sick society might be healed. This leads us to Lao Tzu, the supposed author of Tao te Ching, arguably the most profound and beautiful book ever written. Yet it is very short, unlike the Indian scriptures and I Ching with its 4096 interpretations of the relationships between the hexagrams. Tao te Ching can be read in just forty minutes, although it can take many years of self-inquiry to fully understand the meaning of the words. Tao literally means ‘Way’ although its symbol ( 道 ) can also mean ‘teaching’.171 As such, Tao corresponds to Dharma and Rita in Indian teachings and Logos in Heraclitus’ mystical philosophy. And like Logos, Tao could have both an exoteric and esoteric meaning. “From earliest times the term has been used in the sense of human behaviour and moral laws—the Way of man; this certainly is its meaning in Confucian texts.”172 But for Lao Tzu, Tao is the ineffable first principle governing the Universe, from which all appearances arise, which we can simply call the creative power of Life or God the Creator. But Tao does not only denote an outer movement from our Divine Source; it also denotes the central purpose of life: to return to the Tao, in complete union with the Divine, as Chap- ter 16 in Tao te Ching indicates: 828 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Attain to utmost Emptiness. Cling single-heartedly to interior peace. While all things are stirring together, I only contemplate the Return. For flourishing as they do, Each of them will return to its root. To return to the root is to find Peace. To find Peace is to fulfil one’s destiny. To fulfil one’s destiny is to be constant. To know the Constant is called Insight. If one does not know the Constant, One runs blindly into disasters. If one knows the Constant, One can understand and embrace all. If one understands and embraces all, One is capable of doing justice. To be just is to be kingly; To be kingly is to be heavenly; To be heavenly is to be one with the Tao; To be one with the Tao is to abide forever. Such a one will be safe and whole Even after the dissolution of his body.173 Because Wholeness is the union of all opposites, the Taoists advocated divine lovemaking between woman and man, called fang-chung shu ‘arts of the inner chamber’, as one way of coming into union with the Tao.174 For me, mystical sex, in which two become one, is the most beautiful and effective meditation practice there is. In divine lovemaking, when thinking stops, the beloveds are able to concentrate totally on the present moment, acting spontaneously, totally in tune with each other and the Divine.175 There is nothing more empowering to and confirming of what it truly means to be a divine, cosmic human being. Today, such sexual practices have become popular because the Tantric branches of Hin- duism and Buddhism advocated similar intimate approaches to the Divine. Tantra also en- capsulates a sense of Wholeness, tantra literally meaning ‘context, continuum’, from tan ‘to stretch, extend’. The word also has associations with looms and weaving,176 weaving together the opposites of warp and weft. There are many books, videos, courses, and teachers of mystical sexual practices today, including Osho,177 Barry Long,178 Margo Anand,179 and David Deida.180 But useful as these aids might be on one’s spiritual journey, they all need to be ignored when actually engaging in divine lovemaking, for then no words or rituals are required. Indeed, they can get in the way. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 829 Such sexual approaches to mysticism are in marked contrast to the emphasis on celibacy in many spiritual traditions, which Nukunu Larsen suggests has more to do with social than spiritual reasons. In early patriarchal societies, a man had to decide early in life whether to develop his spirituality or marry and become a householder, fully occupied with supporting a large family. But if the sadhus and sannyasins had been allowed to express their sexuality freely, they would have been a threat to families, the fundamental unit in any human society. So the belief arose, “You cannot be enlightened if you indulge in sex.”181

The Greek mind We now come to the Hellenic civilization, which, by a circuitous route, was to lay down the philosophical, scientific, logical, and mathematical foundations of Western civilization, also influencing, to some extent, Western religion and mysticism. Like all other subsections in this chapter, this is a vast subject with an immense literature. All we can do here, therefore, is to highlight a few key points as they prefigure the Principle of Unity, Integral Relational Logic, and the Unified Relationships Theory, also mentioning where the Greek mind inhibits us from dealing intelligently with the great global crisis we all face today. The key point here is that the Greek mind cannot be understood with the Greek mind or with a Western mind that has blindly evolved from our immediate predecessors, the leaders of which were living during the childhood stage of human phylogeny. At the same time, we should not forget that the True Nature of every human being who has ever lived on Earth, who is living now, or who ever will live, is Wholeness. This also means that the Greek mind cannot be understood by an Eastern mind, conditioned by its Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist inheritance, which similarly prevents us from unifying all opposites in Wholeness, even though these spiritual philosophies may embody an all-inclusive, both-and approach to life. We should also not forget that with a few notable exceptions the Greeks were more focused on the 1% of the Universe that is accessible to our physical senses, knowing much less about their inner worlds, despite the maxim “Know thyself,” inscribed on the temple of Apol- lo at Delphi. Even today, science is primarily focused on this 1%, which means that we are running our business affairs with our eyes closed, having little understanding of the evolutionary energies that are causing us to behave as we do. So when the Greeks set out to build a comprehensive model of the Universe, they began with material substances as basic building blocks, perhaps influenced by contacts with the Babylonians and Egyptians, who had founded the science of astronomy. Thales (c. 624–c. 546 BCE), who Bertrand Russell considered the first philosopher, seems to have set the ball in motion with the assertion that everything is made of water.182 Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 BCE), a student of Thales in the Milesian school in Miletus in Ionia, took a different, very advanced view. Anaximander similarly held that all things come from a single primal substance, but it 830 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY is not water or any other substance that we know, for if any of these substances were primary, all the others would cease to exist.183 Today, we know this ‘substance’ as Consciousness, but it seems that the Greeks did not follow this path, for one of Anaximander’s pupils, Anax- imenes (c. 585–c. 525 BCE), thought that air is the most basic element.184 Bertrand Russell thought that Heraclitus preferred fire as the primordial element185 from such fragments as this: “This Universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.” But is this reference to fire meant to be taken literally? Heraclitus was the pre-eminent Greek mystic, with a depth of experience on a par with Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Jesus of Nazareth. So when he said, “The phases of fire are craving and satiety,” he was clearly referring to an inner, psychological fire, as when we say that someone has fire in their belly, indicating that the creative power of Life is an active, driving force within them. We should also not forget that fire was a primary source of light in ancient times before the invention of the light bulb. So fire can also be a metaphor for the coherent light of Consciousness shining through us all. We’ll come back to Heraclitus in a moment. But in the meantime, with various competing ideas for the primordial element, Empedocles (c. 490–430 BCE) “suggested a statesmanlike compromise by allowing four elements, earth, air, fire, and water.”186 The Greeks were not alone in regarding these four substances as the basic building blocks of the Universe. Hindus and Buddhists took a similar perspective.187 However, as with so many things, the Chinese took a different view. The basic elements in Chinese philosophy were metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, which exist in dual energetic cycles called generating and overcoming.188 But they went further. The Chinese called the active principle within every living being qi or ch’i, literally ‘air, breath’, analogous to Sanskrit prana, Greek pneuma, and Latin spiritus,189 which Henri Bergson called élan vital.190 In human terms, the Greek daimon or dæmon could mean ‘an attendant or indwelling spirit’, corresponding to Latin genius ‘The tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his character, and finally to conduct him out of the world’.191 With the demise of the prehistoric gods and goddesses and the death of God, postmodern science today denies the existence of any such spiritual energies, which the Greeks can help us reinstate, as we continue this review of the Greek mind. It seems that it was Plato who first called fire, earth, air, and water elements, using the Greek word stoicheion ‘first principle, primary matter’, also ‘letter of the alphabet’. Element itself derives from Latin elementum, whose etymology is unknown, but could perhaps come from lmn, “first three letters of the second half of the Canaanite alphabet, recited by ancient scribes when learning it”.192 For like its Greek counterpart, elementum could mean ‘letter of CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 831 the alphabet’. Even today, mathematicians sometimes use the triplet l, m, n to denote integral variables in contrast to x, y, z, denoting real or complex variables. Plato also associated these four elements with the four regular convex polyhedra193 discovered by the Egyptians,194 as Table 11.11 shows, the second line being the symbols that the Greeks used for these basic constituents.195

Fire Earth Air Water

Tetrahedron Hexahedron Octahedron Icosahedron

Table 11.11: Association of primitive elements to polyhedra But how could the fifth so-called Platonic solid—the dodecahedron discovered by the Etruscans196—fit into this model? Well, Plato suggested that this fifth construction is associated with the Cosmos, with that “which the god used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven.”197 Aristotle associated the dodecahedron with aither ‘pure, fresh air’, in Latin æther, “the pure essence where the gods lived and which they breathed”.198 The aether was thus the fifth element or quintessence, from the Latin translation of pempta ‘fifth’ and ousia ‘being, essence’, “thought to be the substance of the heavenly bodies and latent in all things”.199 This notion of the aether (spelled this way to distinguish it from the most common ether CH3-CH2-O-CH2-CH3, a volatile, highly flammable liquid once used as an anaesthetic) is a clear indication that the Greeks had not completely lost touch with their True Nature. They still seemed to have some awareness that Consciousness is all there is, that Consciousness always has been and always will be the overall Context for all our lives. But as the evolution of the mind was still at a comparatively early stage of its development, it was not the time for the Whole Truth to be revealed at this time. In the event, while modern science rejected fire, earth, air, and water as basic elements, the notion of the aether survived into the nineteenth century as ‘luminiferous aether’.200 Just as water and sound waves require a transmission medium, it was thought that the classical notion of aether was needed to carry electromagnetic waves, such as light. However, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley showed in a famous experiment in 1887 that an ‘aether wind’ 832 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY could not be detected as the Earth passed through the supposed aether.201 Although Albert Einstein did not specifically mention the Michelson–Morley experiment in his 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity,202 he did say that the notion of ‘aether-drift’203 is ‘superfluous’ in his theory.204 This may be so. But physical cosmologies cannot account for the coherent light of Consciousness, which Jesus of Nazareth referred to when he said, “I am the light of the world,”205 but which can shine through all of us once the cloud of unknowing is dispersed and we become fully awakened or enlightened like Shakyamuni Buddha. As mentioned page 692 in Chapter 9, ‘An Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac’, Leucippus (fl. 5th century BCE) and his student Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE) took a somewhat different view of the basic building blocks of the Universe. They believed that all matter is made up of indivisible units that they called atoms. Of course, this is nonsense. But nevertheless, to this day particle physicists are still searching for an indestructible element of matter. They have even persuaded governments to give them ten billion dollars with which to build the LHC particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. Given the absurdity of this experiment, it is not surprising that this machine broke down just nine days206 after being switched on on 10th September 2008.207 Regarding the four classical elements, astrologers still regard them as central to their studies, as Table 11.12 indicates. But perhaps we should just take these as hooks on which to hang pairs of opposites, arranged as the cross of duality in IRL, depicted in Figure 3.10 on page 238 in Chapter 3, ‘Unifying Opposites’. For instance, Aristotle associated fire, earth, air, and water with the primary-secondary pairs of hot-dry, dry-cold, cold-wet, and wet-hot, respectively in his book Physics.208 Fire Earth Air Water 21 Mar - 20 Apr - 21 May - 22 Jun - Aries Taurus Gemini Cancer ♈ 19 Apr ♉ 20 May ♊ 21 Jun ♋ 22 Jul 23 Jul - 23 Aug - 23 Sep - 24 Oct - Leo Virgo Libra Scorpio ♌ 22 Aug ♍ 22 Sep ♎ 23 Oct ♏ 22 Nov 23 Nov - 22 Dec - 20 Jan - 19 Feb - Sagittarius Capricorn Aquarius Pisces ♐ 21 Dec ♑ 19 Jan ♒ 18 Feb ♓ 20 Mar Table 11.12: Ancient signs of the Zodiac But Aristotle took two other views of basic building blocks for our models of the Universe in his writings, as mentioned on pages 166 and 168 in Chapter 1, ‘Starting Afresh at the Very Beginning’. In Metaphysics, Aristotle regarded ‘Being qua Being’ as the foundation of his ontology. As he said, the science of Being is not the same as any of the so-called particular sciences.209 It is of the utmost generality, and so Being can be truly used as the single concept with which we can build a coherent model of the Universe, of both our outer and inner CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 833 worlds. Then in The Categories, in which he began to lay down the foundations of deductive, either-or Western logic, he identified ten basic concepts as subjects that could take attributes called ‘predicates’.210 Aristotle’s metaphysics is thus the prime example of “The principle of ontological economy, usually formulated as ‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’,”211 know as Ockham’s razor after William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349), an English Franciscan.212 But it was not until the mid 1960s, when Ole-Johan Dahl, Bjørn Myhrhaug, and Kristen Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo designed the programming language Simula, that evolution gave us the opportunity to use the concept of Being as the basic building block of our models of the Totality of Existence and hence of the evolutionary psychodynamics of society. For Dahl and his colleagues introduced the basic concepts of class and object in order to develop a language that could simulate the dynamics of the ‘real world’. Object-oriented modelling methods and programming languages have since become the standard for developing information systems in business because they closely model the underlying structure of the mind and hence of the Universe. The ease-of-use of modern desktop human interfaces to computers, introduced by Apple, and the entire Internet is based on the object-oriented par- adigm. It is thus natural that IRL should generalize this notion of object into being, thus providing the framework for the much sought-for theory of everything, called the ‘Unified Relationships Theory’ in this book. To see the social significance of the URT, we need to turn to Plato’s Republic and to four of its principal influences: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Socrates. The Greek title for this seminal work was Politeia from polis originally meaning ‘community’, which came to refer to Greek city states whose citizens (free men as distinct from slaves, and men as distinct from women) formed a very small community.213 The communal interest of these people, who seemed to have formed the democracy, was what the Romans called res publica ‘a public matter’, from res ‘thing’214 from a PIE base rē- ‘to bestow, endow’, also root of real, and publica, feminine of publicus ‘of the people’, alteration (influenced by pubes ‘adult men’) of pop- licus, from populus ‘people’, of Etruscan origin. So as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg on 19th November 1863, a republic is a system of government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, urging that it should not perish from the Earth just as the USA was engaged in a great civil war.215 In contrast, private derives from Latin privare ‘to deprive of’, as Erich Fromm tells us.216 However, Plato did not think that a democracy was a satisfactory system of government, not the least because it was the people who had sentenced his beloved teacher Socrates to death. Democracy derives from Greek demokratia ‘popular government’ from demos ‘people, district, land’, from a PIE base *dā ‘to divide’ and –kratia ‘power, rule’ from kratos ‘strength, 834 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY might, rule, authority’. So etymologically, a democracy is a system of government that divides rather than heals. It is therefore not surprising that Plato sought an alternative, recognizing that the people were not sufficiently educated to govern themselves, not the least because they did not have the necessary self-awareness. The alternative that Plato sought for his ideal society was an elitist one, ruled by what he called ‘philosophers’. From many accounts, it seems that Pythagoras was the first to call himself a philosopher ‘lover of wisdom’,217 from philein ‘to love’ and philos ‘friend’, and sophia ‘knowledge, learning, wisdom’, one devoted to the search for fundamental truth.218 This is essentially why today’s society is ungovernable. How can a society based on the seven pillars of unwisdom, on the belief that we are separate from God, Nature, and each other, possibly be viable? Surely the only sustainable way of peacefully managing our affairs is to base our learning on the seven pillars of wisdom, knowing that Consciousness is the Cosmic Context that embraces us all and that Love is the Divine Essence that we all share. To Plato, a philosopher is “the man who is ready to taste every branch of learning, is glad to learn and never satisfied.”219 Knowing the immense power of abstract thought, a philosopher is therefore a generalist rather than a specialist, more focused on Wholeness than fragments. Philosophers also “have the capacity to grasp the eternal and immutable”. In contrast, those who are not philosophers “are lost in multiplicity and change”, and so are not qualified to be in charge of a state.220 Furthermore, philosophers “will be self-controlled and not grasping about money. Other people are more likely to worry about the things which make men so eager to get and spend money”.221 So a society ruled by financiers, economists, and ac- countants is also not viable. To see how Plato proposed to help create utopia, we first need to turn to Heraclitus and Parmenides. We know very little about Heraclitus for none of his writings have survived as a whole. All we have are fragments mentioned by other writers, often paraphrasing the original, in order to refute what Heraclitus said. As Bertrand Russell said, we only know Heraclitus through the polemics of his rivals, but even through the malice spread by his enemies, he still appears great.222 Furthermore, the modern translations and commentaries we have in English vary widely depending on whether the interpreter is a mystic or an academic. For instance, Osho gave a series of dialogues in December 1974 on the fragments of Her- aclitus, in which he said, “The Logos is the logic of the whole, the logic of existence itself. The Logos is the ultimate law. It is the same as what Lao Tzu calls Tao, what the Upanishads and Vedas have called the Rit: the cosmic harmony where opposites meet and disappear, where two become one, where no polarity exists, where all paradoxes are dissolved, all contradictions disappear. What Shankara calls the Brahma, Heraclitus calls the Logos.”223 In contrast to this esoteric meaning of Logos, Charles H. Kahn gave Logos an exoteric meaning, translating it as ‘report’ or ‘account’.224 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 835 Heraclitus’ most famous saying was actually a paraphrase made by Plutarch:225 “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on. They go forward and back again.”226 It was from this and other similar statements that Heraclitus came to be known as the ‘philosopher of change’. Heraclitus came to the realization that the entire relativistic world of form is constantly changing—like the Buddha’s notion of imper- manence (avidya)—because he looked inwards. As he said, “I have searched myself.”227 He urged others to do likewise: “It pertains to all men to know themselves and to be temperate.”228 Like Heraclitus, we only know Parmenides through fragments, fragments of a poem known as On Nature (Peri Physeos), which seems to mean ‘near nature’. The poem consists of three parts, a proem or introduction and two sections called ‘Way of Truth’ and ‘Way of Opinion’, from aletheia ‘truth, reality’ and doxa ‘opinion, delusion’, which can also be regarded as objective and subjective perspectives.229 As the Way of Truth is by far the most interesting, 90% of this mystical section has survived230 through quotations made by other writers,231 rather like the fragments of Heraclitus. Again, like Heraclitus, how we interpret Parmenides depends on whether a mystic consciously guided by the Principle of Unity or a modern-day, either-or philosopher does so. But before we look at how Plato appears to have interpreted Parmenides vis-à-vis Heracli- tus, let us look at what Parmenides actually said. The proem, Fragment 1, consisting of 332 words in English, describes Parmenides’ initiation on a mystical path. Immortal maidens, Daughters of the Sun (Helios), guided him on his chariot drawn by mares, to meet the God- dess, to “learn all things, both the persuasive, unshaken heart of Objective Truth, and the subjective beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.” He was thereby led through the gates of Night and Day into Wholeness, the union of all opposites.232 With much feminine energy, Parmenides was thus led from darkness into light, for all is full of light, obscuring night (Frag- ment 9). We know the bulk of Parmenides’ writings on Aletheia ‘True Reality’ because the Neopla- tonist Simplicius of Cilicia (c. 490–c. 560 CE) made a lengthy transcription (Fragment 8 consisting of 610 words) because of the scarcity of Parmenides’ treatise.233 Fragments 2 to 7, consisting of just 245 words, are more concerned with refuting paths other than with his own, an approach that actually contradicts Parmenides’ description of Ultimate Reality as he experienced it. I am now in a bit of a dilemma in relating Parmenides’ experience of ineffable Wholeness to my own because I do not understand ancient Greek and only have English translations to guide me. As with the mystical writings of the East, it is especially important here both to resonate with the experience and with the language in which it is expressed. 836 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Parmenides began by giving a name for the Absolute Whole, usually translated as ‘It is’ and ‘What is’. ‘What is’ is a translation of to eon234 and ‘It is’ is a translation of the Greek word for is, because in Greek a verb could stand on its own without a subject. For instance, Greek uei and Latin pluit ‘rains’ both meant ‘it rains’.235 Parmenides used estin to mean ‘is’, from a PIE base *es-, also the root of essence and yes, as well as is, itself. The ancient Greek for both to be and to exist seems to have been either eimi or einai, which has a present participle ont, the root of ontology and ontogeny. Parmenides thus seems to be using the verb estin for Exist- ence, not unlike the name that Moses used for God in the Torah, in Hebrew Ehyeh-Asher- Ehyeh,236 translated in the King James Bible as ‘I AM THAT I AM’. Parmenides then says that Existence is not divisible; it is a plenum, full of what-is. Exist- ence is a continuum, lacking nothing, complete from every direction, like the bulk of a perfect sphere, evenly balanced in every way from the centre.237 Parmenides’ approach is therefore all-inclusive. So it makes no sense to refute any other path that might appear to him as contradictory. For as Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land,” and Aletheia means ‘Truth’. Nevertheless, this description is very similar to what I experience as the vast ocean of Con- sciousness, a perfect sphere of water, which is all there is. While the ocean is ever changing, like the waves continuously crashing on the west coast of Europe, the Atlantic, as a metaphor for Ultimate Reality, doesn’t actually change, at least not in the timescale we live in; it remains the Atlantic Ocean. As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr said in his famous epigram published in his satirical journal Les Guêpes (The Wasps) in January 1849, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” usually translated as ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’238 This view of Reality led Parmenides to say that Existence is ungenerated, imperishable, immovable, and complete. “How and from where did it grow?” he asks. He answers his own question by saying, “I shall not permit you to say or to think that it grew from what-is-not, for it is not to be said or thought that it is not.”239 This notion has entered Western philosophy as ‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ in Latin Ex nihilo nihil fit.240 Shakespeare adopted this philosophy in King Lear when Cordelia remained silent when her father, the King, pushed her to flatter him. As he said, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.”241 Parmenides, like Aristotle, seems to have had trouble with the Pythagorean notion of the Void, the beginning state of Heaven and Earth in Genesis, and the central notion in Buddhism as Shunyata ‘Emptiness’. By saying that Ultimate Reality is unchanging, despite all appearances to the contrary, Par- menides seems to be contradicting Heraclitus’ view that all is flux. But as Osho, the supreme both-and teacher, said in a dialogue on Tantra in 1977, Heraclitus and Parmenides were both half-right, speaking in half-truths.242 By the Principle of Unity, at the heart of our rapidly changing world is something that does not change, that belongs to us all. Indeed, Heraclitus was very well aware of the Oneness that we all share, for he said, “Wisdom is one and unique,” CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 837 and “Listening to me but not to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.”243 So there really is no difference between Heraclitus and Parmenides; they are both describing their ineffable, mystical experiences in words to the best of their ability, words that inevitably lead to duality. To see how Plato resolved the apparent contradiction between Heraclitus and Parmenides, we need to turn to Socrates, about whom we know even less than his mystical predecessors, for he did not write anything down. What we know is primarily gleaned from the character ‘Socrates’ in Plato’s Dialogues. But it is very hard to judge how far this character is meant to portray the historical Socrates or to be merely the mouthpiece of Plato’s own opinions.244 What we best know is that Socrates was put to death because the authorities were afraid that his great wisdom was corrupting young people in Athens: “Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.”245 So what were the authorities so afraid of? Well, above all, Socrates was “a man consumed by a passion for the Truth,” conducting his searches through self-inquiry, affirming the Del- phic motto “Know thyself,”246 a wise, intelligent way of living that has been seen as a threat to the prevailing authorities throughout the ages. Indeed, Plato tells us, through Socrates, not without a little irony, that the seven sages of Greece247 thought that doing philosophy was merely inscribing pithy one-liners on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, such as “KNOW THY- SELF and NOTHING TOO MUCH”,248 which corresponds closely to the Swedish principle of lagom ‘just the right amount’,249 which has no corresponding word in English. But Socrates knew that slogans and sound bites, as we call them today, are not enough to truly know oneself. Given the violent times he lived in, Socrates was also interested in determining the characteristics of an ideal society, seeing a close connection between virtue and knowledge.250 Socrates reasoned that if one wishes to choose actions that are good, one must know what ‘good’ is, apart from any specific circumstances.251 This notion was to lead to Pla- to’s theory of Forms or Ideas from the Greek eidos and idea, respectively, which Plato seems to have used interchangeably, and which Desmond Lee sometimes translates as ‘quality’. Beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, and good and evil are all qualities (eidos).252 Now while Plato went along to some extent with Heraclitus that all is flux, he nevertheless wanted something that is unchangeable in his philosophy, no doubt to give himself a firm base, a sense of security in life. However, it would appear that he could not grasp Parmenides’ mystical notion of immutable Wholeness; he needed something more tangible. It was So- crates’ search for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty that was to enable Plato to reconcile the changeless and ever-changing. As Ralph Blumendau tells us, “The theory of Ideas is Plato’s answer to the tension between Heraclitus, who had said that everything was in a state of flux, and Parmenides, who had believed that our senses deceive us and that, philosophically speak- 838 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ing, no change is ever possible.”253 Plato thus divided the Universe into two worlds, a visible and intelligible realm, which was eventually to lead to the deep schism between science and religion, as the remainder of this chapter describes, leading to the great crisis of the mind, addressed in the next chapter. It is thus of vital importance that we learn to heal the split mind, for until we end the war between science and religion there cannot possibly be Peace on Earth, which we look at in Chapter 14, ‘The Age of Light’ on page 1131, as we return Home to Paradise. And this miracle could happen by going back to Plato’s fundamental principles, which led to the distinction between universals and particulars, which are vitally important for social order. This distinction is central to object-oriented business modelling methods, where it takes the form of classes and instances of those classes. There is thus not what D. M. Arm- strong calls the ‘Problem of Universals’,254 for if there were such a problem, the Internet could not have been built. Once we know that all concepts, whether they be abstract or concrete, are formed by paying careful attention to the similarities and differences in the data patterns in our experience, all difficulties disappear. The development of ideas is as much an evolutionary process as the development of the species, a notion that lies at the heart of the class- object relationship in object-oriented modelling systems in business, which has evolved into Integral Relational Logic, the gnostic foundation and metaphysical framework for the Uni- fied Relationships Theory, the theory of everything. Plato’s distinction between universals and particulars has played such a key role in the evolution of Western civilization that Richard Tarnas began his study into the passion of the Western mind with Plato’s philosophy, the basis of which “was a view of the Cosmos as an ordered expression of certain primordial essences or transcendent first principles, variously conceived as Forms, Ideas, universals, changeless absolutes, immortal deities, divine archai, and archetypes.”255 For Plato, there was thus a primary-secondary relationship between eternal verities and the relativistic world of our senses. As Plato was seeking to develop the fundamental principles of an ideal society, he expressed this primary-secondary relationship in social terms, between the rulers and ruled, between the philosophers and what Parmenides called ‘mortals’, the implication being that mystics, like himself, know that our True Nature is immortal. But that is not most people’s view today. Scientists and financiers are the new elite, attempting to make sense of the ever- changing physical universe, regarding trade and economic growth to be more important than the awakening of human consciousness. The West thus puts second things first, focusing attention on what is called maya in the East, on what is illusory. Western civilization is upside down, standing on its head, on the intellect rather than on self-reflective, Divine Intelligence, called the Witness in some spiritual circles. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 839 We can begin to put Western civilization back on its feet by using Plato’s two modes of apprehension, which relate to his two realities. The first mode is the way of knowledge, both gnosis and episteme in Greek, which Plato seems to have used interchangeably, but which we distinguish in IRL, as Figure 1.51, ‘Foundations of all knowledge’ on page 172 indicates. The second mode is called doxa by both Plato and Parmenides, most often translated as ‘opinion’, but which could also mean ‘belief’. We know very little of what Parmenides wrote about the Way of Opinion for only eleven fragments survive (9 to 19) consisting of 539 words. Presum- ably, his successors did not think that this section of the poem was worth preserving, so we do not need to investigate further. “Doxa is cognate to the verb dokein which means ‘to seem’ and is used in phrases which we translate as ‘I think so’, ‘it seems to me,’ ” as Desmond Lee, the translator of the Penguin edition of The Republic tells us. But, as he says, no matter how “confident and correct the judgement so expressed, it still lacks authenticity because its foundations are inadequate.”256 In English today, we use doxa to form such words as orthodox ‘right opinion’, heterodox ‘other opinion’, and paradox ‘contrary opinion’, which has come to mean ‘self-contradictory’, contrary to commonsense, which doesn’t understand that the entire Universe is based on a paradox: Wholeness is the union of all opposites, the Principle of Unity. What is authentic to Plato is the essential nature of things, such as beauty, which is eternal and divine, not like the concepts that we form in our minds, although it is through our minds that we access these divine essences. Perhaps this is understandable because Plato knew nothing of morphogenesis as noogenesis or even biogenesis. As Plato said, “Those who love looking and listening are delighted by beautiful sounds and colours and shapes, and the works of art which make use of them, but their minds are incapable of seeing and delighting in the essential nature of beauty itself.”257 The philosophers are thus superior to the mass of the common people, including painters, musicians, and politicians.258 Plato distinguishes forms and particulars by saying that the former have presence (parousiā, from par ‘beside’ and ousia ‘being, essence’), while the latter ‘share in’ or ‘partake of’ the form, from the Greek metechein,259 metecho also meaning ‘enjoy with others’. As Plato says, those who only see instances of universals are dreaming, while those who see both the essence of beauty, for instance, and the particular things that share in it are very much awake.260 This means, of course, that an awakened community is one in which the members of the group do not egoically see themselves just as individuals, but also see what it truly means to be a human being, see the Divine Essence that we all share, which is Love. In this way, we could cocreate the Sharing Economy when the global economy collapses like a house of cards in the years to come. But more than this. If we look at society solely from an anthropocentric perspective, we arrogantly make the whole of humanity special, above the other animals and plants, indeed 840 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY above all other beings. We can take a more humble approach by noting, with Ralph Blume- nau, “a horse, a book, a wife, and a home … participate separately in the Idea of perfect horse- ness, perfect book-ness, perfect wife-ness, and perfect home-ness.” Similarly with human and human-ness. But, as in IRL and object-oriented modelling methods, these Ideas are ‘sub-Ide- as’ of ‘Perfect-ness’ or ‘Good-ness’.261 The Good is thus the ultimate Idea, like the superclass Being in IRL. Plato explains what he means with a metaphor of the sun, which plays a similar role in the visible world to the Good in the intelligible world, making a play on words in Greek here,262 for oratos means ‘visible’ and ouranos means ‘physical universe’, literally ‘heaven’, ouranios meaning ‘heavenly’. Desmond Lee the translator provides a simple table illustrating the relationship between the two realms:263 Visible World Intelligible World The Sun The Good Source of growth and light Source of reality and truth which gives which gives visibility to objects of sense intelligibility to objects of thought and and the power of seeing to the power of knowing to the eye. the mind. The faculty of sight. The faculty of knowledge. What Plato calls the Good is thus what we call the coherent light of Consciousness in the URT. Indeed, in English we say ‘I see’ both for visible objects and also when the ‘penny drops’, when we understand what someone is saying. As Plato says, “When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminated by Truth and Reality, it understands them, and its possession of intelligence is evident; but when it is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.”264 Much of science and business is focused on this twilight world today, not able to see the truth of human existence because the clouds of unknowing obliterate the radiant light of Consciousness, which would otherwise shine brilliantly through us. Plato shed further light on doxa, which he divided into pistis ‘belief’ and eikasia ‘illusion’,265 cognate with icon, with his famous metaphor of the cave. Ordinary people, who have not yet seen the vision of Ultimate Truth, who are ignorant of our human condition, are like prisoners in a cave with their legs and necks “so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads”. Behind them is a fire, as a source of light rather than heat, which projects images or shadows of figures moving on a walkway between the prisoners and the fire on the wall in front of them. As they have been so incarcerated since childhood, these shadows are the prisoners’ only reality.266 In modern terms, it is like believing that the CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 841 images we see on television are real, rather like Chance the Gardener, played by Peter Sellers, in Being There, a direct translation of the term Dasein used by the German phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe the essential nature of human beings.267 Suppose one of the prisoners were then let loose and turned to face the fire and the actual figures moving on the walkway, as Plato, through Socrates, narrates. Wouldn’t he be at a loss to understand that the objects that he was now looking at were more real than the shadows he had been watching all his life? Furthermore, suppose he was then dragged out of the cave into the upper world full of sunlight. Wouldn’t he then be so dazzled by the glare of the Sun that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real?268 Such a prisoner would be rather like Arjuna in Bhagavad Gita who was dazzled by the Ultimate Cosmic Vision when showed it by Krishna.269 Eventually, the prisoner, like Arjuna, would grow accustomed to the brilliant light and could look on objects as themselves, by which Plato means eternal, divine Forms. But while congratulating himself on his good fortune, the prisoner would then have a problem. How could he explain what he had seen to his fellow prisoners in the cave? Wouldn’t they say that his visit to the upper world had ruined his sight and that the ascent was not even worth attempting?270 The prisoner would thus be in a similar situation to the man who fell into the Country of the Blind, situated in a deep valley in the mountains of Ecuador, narrated by H. G. Wells,271 a social situation that we return to in Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1027. Plato saw mathematics, as geometry and calculation, as a step on the path to enlightenment, but not the final step. For mathematical objects, such as circle, line, point, and the number 3, are real objects to a mathematician, not unlike Forms, invisible except to the eye of reason (dianoia).272 Indeed, such concepts show the immense power of abstract thought. When our prehistoric ancestors saw that three sheep, three apples, and three arrows have the quantity three in common,273 they were forming concepts in exactly the same way as all other concepts, as abstractions from Consciousness. Indeed, to Plato, mathematics was so important that he hung this motto over the entrance to his Academy: “Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.”274 Plato’s Academy, the first permanent centre of learning that was to form the prototype for the medieval universities, was so named because it was located in a sacred grove where Academus, an Attic hero, was buried.275 We look at the role that the universities played in the evolution of the mind later. In giving a high position to mathematics in the Academy, Plato was following in the steps of the Pythagoreans, a mysterious occult school, as much interested in the soul, like Plato, as in science, philosophy, and mathematics. Plato was thus a Pythagorean, going much deeper into the qualities of a philosopher, ‘a lover of wisdom’. Like Socrates, Pythagoras himself did 842 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY not write anything down. In searching for the essence underlying the diversity of all phenomena, the Pythagoreans found this essence in number and numerical relationships,276 sometimes expressed as ‘All is number’, yet another fundamental principle of the Universe. This was to lead to the principle of modern science and economics that nature and business should only be quantitatively interpreted in terms of number and numerical relationships.277 But as is well known today, the mathematical concept of set, which is central to semantics and meaning, is more fundamental than that of number. To reflect this, in IRL, which has evolved from the semantic modelling methods used by information systems designers in business, domains of values can be both quantitative and qualitative. But it seems that the Pythagoreans had a more fundamental concept, that of monad, from Greek monas ‘unit’ from monos ‘alone’, cognate with monk. However, the Pythagorean meaning of monad is open to various interpretations. Some say that monad is “an elementary individual substance that reflects the order of the world and from which material properties are derived”.278 As such, it is similar to the concept of atom. Monad could also be “the name of the beginning number of a series, from which all following numbers derived”.279 In this instance, monad is one. In yet another interpretation, according to the Pythagoreans, monad was a term for God or the first being, or the totality of all beings. Monad being the Source or the One without division.280 Figure 11.13 shows the Pythagorean symbol for monad, which resonates very deeply with the Unified Relationships Theory. We are now much, much closer to Nondual Truth and hence Wholeness. Indeed, according to Diogenes Laërtius, the second- century CE biographer of the Greek philosophers, “from the monad evolved the dyad; from it numbers; from numbers, points; then lines, two-dimensional entities, three-dimensional entities, bodies, culminating in the four elements earth, water, fire and air, from which the rest of our world is built up.”281 We are now very close to a Taoist worldview, for Lao Tzu wrote: Tao gave birth to one, One gave birth to two, Figure 11.13: Symbol for monad Two gave birth to three, Three gave birth to all myriad things. All the myriad things carry Yin on their back and hold the Yang in their embrace.282 But in keeping with Plato’s idealistic approach to life, the classical Greeks were not really interested in using number to measure physical properties, even though they were star-gazers, interested in penetrating the mysteries of the physical universe, which was, to them as it is to most today, the Universe. They were purists, more pure than applied mathematicians, more CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 843 interested in abstractions and generalities, because these brought them closer to the Godhead, to the Divine. Such an emphasis also reflected the structure of Greek society. As Morris Kline tells us, “The philosophers, mathematicians, and artists were members of the highest social class. This upper stratum either completely disdained commercial pursuits and manual work or regarded them as unfortunate necessities.”283 So to the Greeks, shapes and forms were more relevant than measurements and calculations.284 Another reason for this arose from the famous Pythagorean theorem that we all learned at school: “In right-angled triangles, the square on the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle,”285 in geometrical terms, also expressed in arithmetical terms: “The sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.” The Babylonians and Egyptians were aware of particular instances of this relationship, for instance, the triangle with sides, 3, 4, and 5. But as the Pythagoreans generalized this principle, how could they handle a right triangle, whose sides are of length 1 and whose hypotenuse is of length 2 ? Such a number is irrational, not rational, not expressible in terms of the ratio of two whole numbers, such as ⅔ or ⅝.286 The existence of irrationals brought a crisis to the Greek pursuit of the truth through the power of reason. For the word reason (nous or logos in Greek) is cognate with ratio and rational, all these words deriving from Latin reri ‘to think, reckon’. So if irrational numbers cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers, how can we think and reason about them? Well, the Greeks solved this problem in a geometric manner, consonant with their emphasis on shape and form. For instance, the diagonal of a square of sides of length 1 has a length of exactly 2 . And such a length could be geometrically handled just like rational lengths. There was no need to resort to approximations, as the Babylonians had done.287 Which brings us to Euclid, the founder of axiomatic, mathematical reasoning, much influenced by Aristotle’s deductive logic. Euclid began his great systematization of the mathematics known to the Greeks with twenty-three definitions, including point, straight line, right angle, and circle, ending with this definition: “Parallel straight lines are straight lines which, being in the same plane and being produced indefinitely in both directions, do not meet one another in either direction.” He then stated ten axioms as five postulates and five common notions, which Aristotle took to be self-evident truths, the fifth postulate being, “That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less that the two right angles.”288 Despite some doubts about whether this parallel postulate is self-evident or not, for more than 2,000 years, it was believed that Euclidean geometry provides a true model of nature. Yet, as was discovered in the nineteenth century, Euclidean geometry is not even true on the 844 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY surface of a sphere, which is where we all live. For lines of longitude, which are parallel at the equator, meet at the poles. As Morris Kline says, such is “the blindness of human beings, great and small”289 through the ages. As we saw on page 28, Einstein began his introductory book Relativity by asking his readers to abandon “the noble building of Euclid’s geometry”. He then went on to examine the assumptions that had held sway for more than two millennia, distinguishing the axiomatic method of pure mathematics with the applicability of geometrical propositions in the physical universe. Then just fifteen years after the publication of this book, Kurt Gödel proved metamathematically that even the axiomatic method of mathematics is open to doubt. As described in Section ‘The loss of certainty’ in Chapter 9, ‘An Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac’ on page 644, any attempt to prove that the axioms of mathematics are complete and consistent leads to contradictions, violating Aristotle’s Law of Con- tradiction: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation,”290 the implicit axiom of both deductive logic and mathematical proof. Although Aristotle was supposedly a lover of wisdom, with the Law of Con- tradiction he laid down the seventh of the seven pillars of unwisdom on which Western civilization is based. The key point here is that human thinking is nonlinear. We create multidimensional pictures in our minds, whether we are scientists, artists, or whatever, unlike mechanical processes, which are essentially linear in the horizontal dimension of time. It is this mechanistic worldview that gave rise to Aristotle’s notion of an unmoved mover: “Now since that which is moved must be moved by something, and the prime mover must be essentially immovable, and eternal motion must be excited by something eternal, … then each of these spatial motions must be excited by a substance which is essentially immovable and eternal.”291 The reason for this mechanistic view of causality is that neither Aristotle nor Euclid began their reasoning at the very beginning, at our Divine Source, in the vertical dimension of time. Just like Plato’s Forms and Ideas, axioms and basic definitions are concepts that develop in the mind through the creative Power of Life, called the Logos by Heraclitus, just like any other evolutionary process. So Aristotle’s notions of subject and predicate, which are core concepts in his syllogistic reasoning,292 have evolved via first-order predicate logic and the relational model of data, which transformed deductive reasoning into nondeductive systems,293 into the concepts of entity and attribute in Integral Relational Logic, a nonlinear science of reason. In turn, in IRL, entities are instances of entity types or classes, which correspond to Plato’s universals. So the basic concepts of class, entity, and attribute have evolved naturally from Plato and Ar- istotle, integrating these concepts within the overall context of Consciousness. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 845 We should not blame Aristotle for violating the Principle Principle of Unity, the fundamental law of the Uni- of Unity verse, thus starting the process by which Western civilization was to move further and further away from Reality, for he was merely reflecting the prevalent either-or thinking of the egoic mind, separated from the Principle Law of Truth. As this diagram from Integral Relational Logic of Unity Contradiction shows, if the Principle of Unity is the thesis and the Law of Contradiction the antithesis, then the Principle Figure 11.14: Putting the West’s either-or thinking in perspective of Unity is the synthesis. Aristotle, as an intellectual, the least spiritual of the great Greek philosophers, thus had much difficulty with the both-and sayings of Heraclitus, who he accused of not reasoning, such as “The hidden harmony is better than the obvious,” “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and want,” and “Into the same rivers we step and do not step.”294 Heraclitus, himself, was well aware that his contemporaries did not follow his method of self-inquiry: “My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.”295 In a sense, this is what Aristotle does in his book Physics, whose title is a transliteration of the Greek title rather than a translation, which should be On Nature.296 The title derives from the Greek word phusis, which, according to the Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary, could mean any of “birth, origin; nature, inborn quality, natural parts; temper; disposition; stature; sex; natural order; creative power; the universe; creature”. So in this book, Aristotle implicitly uses IRL to define and analyse as carefully as possible such central notions as nature, change, cause, time, place, infinity, and void, as we see in Section ‘Aristotle’s four causes’ in Chapter 5, ‘An Integral Science of Causality’ on page 505. What then does Aristotle mean by nature? Well, the distinction he makes between natural objects and those that are not natural is that the former contain within themselves “a source of change and of stability, in respect of either movement or increase and decrease or alteration”. Examples include “animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies like earth, fire, air, and water”. On the other hand, human-made objects such as a bed or a cloak are not natural because they have “no intrinsic impulse for change”.297 To Aristotle, phusis could also mean ‘growth’. So nature is a process of growth from something to something, the end point of which is its form, which is its nature.298 In saying this, Aristotle is beginning to move from the profound to the superficial, from the essence of structures to their outer form. This definition of nature also seems to exclude the firmament of stars, which to Aristotle were immutable, as we see in Figure 11.38, ‘Crys- 846 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY talline spheres’ on page 918. It is curious that phusis, which originally meant the birth and inborn qualities of things, should be transformed into physics, concerned only with external appearances, lying outside philosophy, as Plato conceived it. So today, we are fruitlessly searching for the origin of the Universe by sending satellites and probes into outer space, essentially because we have lost touch with our innate source of change, with our True Nature. Furthermore, where do human beings fit in? The impression given by Aristotle is that human creativity, which gives rise to pictures, sculptures, buildings, poetry, literature, and music; to scientific theories and mathematical theorems; and to machines like cars and computers, is, in some sense, not natural. Today, not only is human creativity thought to be outside the domain of natural science, the arts, as a whole, are separate from science, giving rise to what C. P. Snow called the ‘two cultures’.299 And what creates natural objects as opposed to human-made ones? This is a futile distinction that the Christians make, not least in saying that human words are not the word of God, which only the priestly authorities, who are also human beings, know. In considering the causes of change, Aristotle distinguishes four different types that he describes in both the Physics300 and Metaphysics:301 material, formal, efficient, and final, although he, himself, does not seem to use all these words. Having excluded Life as the primary cause arising directly from our Divine Source, the material cause is particularly strange. Ex- amples are the bronze of a statue or the silver of a bowl. The first examples Aristotle gives of formal cause are related to patterns in formulae, such as “the ratio 2:1, and number in general, cause the octave.” Efficient cause is essentially an agent, such as a deviser of a plan or the father of a child. Fourthly, final or teleological cause relates to the purpose of action, from teleos ‘perfect, complete’. For instance, we walk to get healthy and, in the context of Wholeness, we organize all knowledge into a coherent whole to heal the fragmented, split mind and so find the Truth, Love, Peace, Life, and Freedom. We can resolve Aristotle’s original but confused thinking, which has been passed on through dozens of generations, by going back to the original meaning of form in Greek, as David Bohm suggests. The word form meant, in the first instance, an inner forming activity that is the cause of the growth of things. Formative cause thus emphasizes, “not a mere form imposed from without, but rather an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are”.302 The Unified Relationships Theory being described in this book builds on this notion by recognizing that meaningful structure-forming relationships in the abstract underlie the Totality of Existence and therefore are causal in the most general meaning of the term. Despite Aristotle’s worthy endeavours in searching for the essential nature of things, he could not really find what he was looking for because he lacked the necessary mystical awareness. For instance, as far as I can tell, there is no mention of what Heraclitus called the Logos CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 847 in the Physics. As already mentioned, Aristotle also had great difficulty with what the Pythag- oreans called the Void, which has a causal, evolutionary quality, leading to differentiation. “This happens first among the numbers, because on their view it is the void that distinguishes one number from another.”303 So while we can learn much from the Greek mind, the Greeks were still pretty confused, struggling to make sense of themselves and the world we live in. The examples in this section are just a few that illustrate the stuttering way that the mind has evolved over the years, in what Arthur Koestler calls ‘sleepwalking’. If we are to maintain clarity in our thinking, it is thus vitally important that we start afresh at the very beginning from first principles, as IRL does in Part I of this book. When we look at the evolution of the mind as a whole, it is amazing how often we have not been able to see the obvious. To illustrate this point, we can look at the way that mathematicians have developed a complete set of polyhedra, for this evolutionary process has some similarities with the way that the Unified Relationships Theory has evolved since the ancient Greeks. As already mentioned, the Greeks were well aware of the existence of the five regular Platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron), Euclid proving that none others can exist in the final proposition of the last book in his Elements.304 However, even though the Pythagoreans knew the pentagram as a stellated pentagon,305 the Greeks did not think of stellating the dodecahedron, shown in Figure 11.16, to 11.15: Dodecaheron form the small stellated dodecahedron. Indeed, it was not until 1619 that Johannes Kepler discovered two of the nonconvex regular polyhedra, the small and great stellated dodecahedra.306 And it took another two hundred years before Louis Poinsot discovered in 1810 the great dodecahedron and the great icosahedron, completing the set of what are now called the four Kepler-Poinsot solids, the first three being stellations of the dodecahedron, the fourth the penultimate stellation of the icosahedron.307 Small stellated Great Great stellated Great dodecahedron dodecahedron dodecahedron icosahedron

Figure 11.16: Kepler-Poinsot regular polyhedra, discovered in modern times 848 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Furthermore, although Plato apparently knew about the cuboctahedron, one of the thirteen convex uniform polyhedra, usually ascribed to Archimedes, again it was not until 1619 that Johannes Kepler published the complete list of these Archimedean solids, pointing out that prisms and antiprisms, which are infinite in number, also fit the definition of uniform polyhedra.308 Of the fifty-three nonconvex uniform polyhedra, A. Badoureau, Edmund Hess, and J. Pitsch discovered all but twelve of these in the 1870s and 80s. But it took another half century before H. S. M. Coxeter working with J. C. P. Miller in Canada discovered the other twelve. However, they did not publish their discoveries until 1954, along with M. S. Longuet-Hig- gins, who had independently discovered eleven of the twelve, in the hope of proving that their list was complete.309 S. P. Sopov and J. Skilling, working in Russia and the UK, respectively, independently made such a proof in the 1970s.310 Actually Skilling found one other solid, which could also be considered a uniform polyhedron, depending on how this term is defined.311 Skilling was able to develop his proof because August Möbius, who devised the famous one-sided Möbius strip, showed that there are only three basic symmetrical ways of tiling the sphere with congruent spherical triangles—tetrahedral, octahedral, and icosahedral—the first being a special case of the second, if we discount the infinite set of dihedral groups when two of the angles in the spherical triangles are right angles.312 Hermann Schwarz then extended this idea by showing that there are a finite number of symmetrical tilings consisting of two or more Möbius triangles, now known as Schwarz triangles. Willem Wythoff used these Schwarz triangles to develop a kaleidoscopic way of generating all but one of the 75 uniform polyhedra. Coxeter and his associates used this Wythoff construction in their 1954 paper.313 With the availability of computers, Zvi Har’El from Israel devised a generalized algorithm for calculating the metrics of all the uniform polyhedra,314 using this to generate graphical representations of these solids in a program suitably called Kaleido.315 Robert Webb from Australia used this algorithm in his brilliant program Great Stella, which shows the immense power of the abstract thinking that we have inherited from the Greeks and which has generated the pictures of polyhedra in this chapter.316 Ralph Mäder from Switzerland also ported this algorithm to Mathematica, one of the most amazing computer programs ever devised.317 Mathematica is a treat for mathematicians because it uses a symbolic computer language able to handle symbolic expressions and calculations with equal facility. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, then used this program to write A New Kind of Science, showing that complexity can arise from a few simple principles.318 Of course, Wolfram implicitly used IRL in developing his ideas, like everyone else, showing that his new kind of science is just a special case of the URT. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 849 In hindsight, it is amazing that we sometimes cannot see what is staring us in the face. This happens not only at the individual level, but also at the collective level over hundreds and thousands of years. So even though we have all been using IRL to organize our ideas for thousands of years, it is only in the computer age that what has been hidden for so long can be made explicit, that we can unify rationality and mysticism. In this way, the thousands of years of human learning can reach completion at the Omega point of some fourteen billion years of evolution as a whole.

The birth of coinage While mystics like Shakyamuni Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Heraclitus showed that we are all one, not separate from the Divine, Nature, or each other for a single instant in our lives, the great majority of people were not aware of this fundamental truth of existence. So to facilitate trade, during the first millennium BCE, a further development in the evolution of money was made through the birth of coinage. Indeed, the emergence of coins gave rise to the very word money. Money derives from Latin Moneta, an epithet for Juno, a Roman goddess equivalent to Greek Hera, sister and wife of Zeus, in whose temple money was coined, hence, a mint. Moneta was “the goddess who alerts people”, “she who makes people remember,”319 and “the bringer of warnings”.320 The obverse of this silver denarius of T. Carisius (46 BCE) shows the goddess’ head and the reverse coining implements321 (an anvil between tongs and hammer). So from earliest times, the mysteries of money were associated with superstition, not with that which can be explained in rational terms, soundly grounded in Reality. The word superstition derives from Latin superstitio, from superstare ‘to stand over or upon’, perhaps meaning “standing over a thing in amazement or awe”.322 So superstition has come to mean “Unreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mys- 11.17: Juno Moneta terious, or imaginary”,323 a definition that applies as much to economics as religion. As James Robertson, cofounder of the New Economics Foundation in the UK has said, “Financial mumbo-jumbo holds us in thrall today, as religious mumbo-jumbo held our ancestors [in the late Middle Ages].”324 Actually, as with so many inventions, the Chinese were the first to use metallic artefacts as symbols of value rather than objects in themselves. At the end of the Stone Age, they began, for instance, to manufacture both bronze and copper ‘cowries’. They also made symbols of axes, spears, knives, swords, hoes, and spades out of copper, bronze, and iron,325 shown in Figure 11.18.326 Possibly as early as the twelfth century BCE, the Chinese manufactured round coins with inscriptions, but not with the names or heads of Emperors, which makes 850 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY them difficult to date.327 Figure 11.18 also shows coins from the Han dynasty, about first century BCE. Note that these coins were made from base metals and had a hole in the middle, first to assist with the manufacturing process and secondarily so that they could be strung together. For these coins were of comparatively low value so considerable quantities of them were required.328 This was not the case of the first Greek coins manufactured in Ionia and Lydia in western Anatolia from the seventh and sixth centuries BCE; these were made of precious metals, gold and silver. As an Figure 11.19: Early Greek coins aside, the term ‘Midas touch’ arises from when Midas, the mythical king of Phrygia, took Silenus to Dionysus, the god of wine and mystical ecstasy, in Lydia. As a reward, Midas asked that everything he touched would turn into gold, which was not very convenient because even his food and wine turned into gold.329 Also, Croesus, who has given rise to the English expression ‘as rich as Croesus’, was king of Lydia at the time of the first coins.330 The first coins in the seventh century BCE were pretty primitive, having a crude form, little more than lumps, made of an alloy of gold and silver called electrum.331 But by the sixth century they were beginning to take shape, as Figure 11.19 illustrates. The obverse shows the head of roaring lion facing right with a sun with multiple rays on the forehead. The reverse is a simple double incuse punch.332 These coins were not the first uses of precious metals as a form of cur- 11.18: Early Chinese coins rency. Between 2250 and 2150 BCE in Cappadocia in central Anatolia, silver ingots had been used as money, their weight and purity being assured with a state guarantee.333 This illustrates another point about the evolution of money. Initially, when naturally found objects like cowrie shells were used as money, it was just the quantity that determined their value, called a tale, from PIE base *del- ‘to recount, count’, also root of talk, tell, and teller in English, and tal ‘number’ and tala ‘to speak’, in Swedish.334 So the notion of counting as a means of recording and communication goes to the very roots of our language. It was not only the Pythagoreans who said, “All is number.” Then with the introduction of bullion money, physical attributes of the ingots such as purity and weight became the determining factors. The word bullion comes from Old French bouillon ‘bubble on the surface of boiling liquid, from Latin bullire ‘to form bubbles, to boil’, the word being used in this way perhaps because gold and silver bubbles when it is liquefied CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 851 at temperatures of 1064.18 and 961.78 ˚C, respectively, although the boiling point of these metals is 2856 and 2162 ˚C, respectively.335 But these attributes were not sufficient in themselves. It was also necessary to mark the bars with information about these attributes, called assay marks today. The word assay, cognate with essay, comes from French essai ‘trial, attempt’ from Latin ex- ‘from’ and agere ‘to do, act, drive, conduct, lead, weigh’, from PIE base *ag- ‘to drive, draw, move’, the root of an amazing variety of other words, including actor, actuary, agent, agitate, ambiguous, demagogue, squat, and axiom. We can thus see the beginning of the use of money as information, for as this book describes, the entire Universe, viewed as Consciousness, can be seen as a fully integrated information system, in which the concepts of form, structure, relationships, and meaning are paramount. In this way, we can free our minds of thousands of years of conditioning in which we have primarily used quantitative measure to drive our practical affairs. As the distribution of metals in the Earth’s crust that could be used in coins varies widely, using these native elements as monetary substances needs to be watched very carefully, as the coins can easily be debased. This was also a concern of King Hieron II of Syracuse, who asked Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE) to test the purity of a gold crown in the shape of a laurel wreath that he had had made, without, of course, melting it down. Vitruvius tells us that Ar- chimedes solved this problem one day while taking a bath. Archimedes suddenly realized that bodies heavier than water float because the weight of the displaced fluid acts as an upwards- buoyant force opposing the weight of such objects as boats and their passengers.336 If a body sinks, as in the case of the crown, Archimedes could calculate its volume from the weight of the water and hence determine the crown’s density, which could then be compared with that of pure gold, whose relative density to water was presumably known.337 It is little wonder that Archimedes is supposed to have leapt from his bath and run naked down the streets crying eureka! ‘I have found it!’, although this delightful story is probably apocryphal. Table 11.13 shows a list of metals that could or have been used in coins, with their density338 and distribution in parts per million in the Earth’s crust.339 We can see that the 852 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY very rare, precious metals are heavier than the base metals, a fact that can determine the purity of coins and other objects made of gold or silver. Metal Density (gms/cm3) Distribution (parts per million) Platinum 21.45 ? Gold 19.3 0.005 Silver 10.49 0.05 Copper 8.96 35 Nickel 8.908 70 Iron 7.874 50,000 Tin 7.365 10 Zinc 7.14 65 Aluminium 2.70 83,000 Table 11.13: Metals used for coins The introduction of markings on metal objects to denote their weight and purity led to another development of major significance. Markings could be used as symbols indicating 11.20: Julian denarius the value of the coins, of higher value than 11.21: Flavian solidus that of the metal itself. On the left, is a denarius minted in the name of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, showing the Emperor on the obverse and Venus on the reverse.340 So there was still a close connection between money and emperors, gods, and goddesses, indicating the mysterious nature of money, which continues even to this day. On the right is a gold solidus from around 361 CE, showing Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus,341 as bullion money, without a face value. Gradually, over the years, the face value of coins became predominant, although the Royal Mint still mints a British Gold Sovereign.342 As the total quantity of money in circulation at any one time must be limited if it is to maintain its value, these constraints must inevitably limit people’s activities in a monetary economy. However, throughout the ages, spiritual searchers, seeking to return Home to our Divine Source, refused to be so constrained. Throughout the ages, they have been quite determined to pursue their spiritual aspirations without concern for material wealth, knowing that in Reality there are no separate beings who can be said to own anything. The organized religions seem to have been caught between the mystical and the mundane. They have traditionally been opposed to usury, the practice of lending money at any interest at all, although in later use, usury has come to mean “the practice of charging, taking, or con- tracting to receive, excessive or illegal rates of interest for money on loan”.343 The word usury CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 853 has a very commonplace etymology; it derives from Medieval Latin usuria from classical Latin usura ‘use, enjoyment’ from usus ‘use’, although this meaning is not only Medieval. Cicero (106–43 BCE) used the term usura menstrua to mean ‘monthly interest paid for money borrowed’.344 It is not only with interest that money, essentially a quantitative measure, is reified as a commodity with value to be bought and sold. While money can serve as a least common de- nominator of value for a community, when communities need to trade with one another, they need a means of exchanging not only goods and services, but also different types of money. As noted on page 793, foreign exchange is a type of exploitative bartering system, which made Jesus very angry, as the depiction of the money lenders in the temple by Giovanni Paolo Pannini in Figure 11.22 illustrates.

Figure 11.22: Money lenders by Gionvanni Paolo Pannini Despite the fact that our obsession for money inhibits us from discovering what it truly means to be a human being, necessary if we are to intelligently manage our business affairs with full consciousness of what we are doing, money has proved to be a great convenience through the ages. It is essentially utilitarian, which like usury derives from uti ‘to use’, also the root of usual. So for thousands of years, it has been customary for our business affairs to separate us from the Truth, Love (our Divine Essence), and the immortal Ground of Being that we all share. It is therefore not surprising that there is so much fear in the world, as most have little understanding of the root causes of the unprecedented rate of evolutionary change we are experiencing today. 854 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY The Middle Ages While the first Axial Age from about 600 to 300 BCE marked a major turning point in the evolution of the mind, it was to be several centuries before scholarly, artistic, and technological endeavours went into decline during what Francesco Petrarca ‘Petrarch’ (1304–1374) was to pejoratively call the ‘Dark Ages’,345 the early Middle Ages. In Both these terms refer specifically to European history: “The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the fifteenth century to designate the interval between the downfall of the classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century, a revival in which they felt they were participating.”346 But as the map of what Arnold Toynbee called ‘tertiary civilizations of the old world’ in Figure 11.23347 indicates, the four Middle Eastern civilizations of the second period of development, depicted in Figure 11.10 on page 809, evolved into major civilizations during the first millennium CE, which were to have a profound effect on the development of Western civilization in the second millennium. Once again, given the urgency of the psychological, ecological, and economic crisis we all face today, we can only highlight a few factors that affect our ability to deal intelligently and effectively with this great global crisis.

Figure 11.23: Tertiary civilizations in the old world While the Academy continued until 529 CE, when the Christian emperor Justinian closed it, together with other pagan schools,348 the centre of Greek learning moved to Alexandria after Alexander (356–323 BCE) had conquered Egypt about 332 BCE.349 Alexandria became the centre of the entire ancient world, ideally located at the junction of Asia, Africa, and Europe, with a highly cosmopolitan population.350 For in fewer than ten years, Alexander had con- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 855 quered much of the Middle East as far as the Indus valley, while still in his twenties (he died before was 33). Alexandria, an important centre for traders and businessmen, was not only a centre of Hellenism but was also home to the largest Jewish community in the world. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was produced there.351 Inspired by the great Greek schools founded by Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals who was to become king of Egypt and the progenitor of the 300-year Ptolemaic dynasty, founded the Museum, a home for the Muses, a common work- place for scholars and artists, and the famous library,352 which was said at one time to contain some 750,000 volumes353 from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations.354 It is the fate of history that the library was destroyed on three or four occasions, the first accidently when a fire started by Julius Caesar 48 BCE in the harbour spread into the city.355 The last two occasions were deliberate, first about 391 CE by Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, although the details are pretty confused.356 Finally, when the Muslims conquered Alexandria in 640 CE, the Caliph Omar ordered the destruction of ‘a great library containing all the knowledge of the world’. “The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library’s hold- ings, ‘they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.’ ”357 The establishment of Alexandria in the fourth century BCE also led to a marked change in the direction of Greek thought for two principal reasons. First, the commercial interests of the Alexandrians brought geographical and navigational problems to the fore. Secondly, the scholars were no longer segregated from the people at large. The scholars were thus induced to unite their flourishing theoretical studies with concrete scientific and engineering investigations, inventing an amazing range of devices, including pumps, pulleys, wedges, tackles, odometers, and even steam engines that could drive vehicles along the city streets in annual religious parades.358 The classical ideals of Greek mathematics, which disdained measurement as being for the lower classes, were thus subsumed to some extent by the applications of pure mathematics to practical problems. The supremacy of quantitative values has continued to this day, for as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) said, “when you can measure what you are speaking of and express it in numbers, you know that on which you are discoursing, but when you cannot measure it and express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a very meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”359 In a similar fashion, modern business managers are wont to say, “If you cannot measure, you cannot manage.” It was not until the end of the twentieth century that Socrates and Plato’s programme of self-inquiry through conceptual abstraction and generality, necessary if we are to cocreate an ideal society living in harmony with the fundamental laws of the Universe, was to reach its apotheosis at the Omega point of evolution. 856 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Not that the Alexandrian mathematicians abandoned their theoretical studies altogether. For instance, Archimedes, who was educated in Alexandria and was well noted for his extraordinary mechanical skills, was so pleased to discover that a sphere has two thirds of both the volume and surface area of a circumscribing cylinder360 that he left instructions for his tomb to be marked with a sphere inscribed in a cylinder, as Cicero was to discover a century and a half later.361 In performing their calculations, the Greeks used a simpler notation than that used by the Babylonians, described on page 796. They used the first nine letters of the alphabet to denote the numbers 1 to 9 in the decimal system, with other letters for the tens and hundreds.362 The Greek mathematicians in Alexandria also had many other mathematical symbols, such as ] for ¼ and [ for ⅔.363 While they had a name for zero (mēdén ‘nothing’) and a symbol for a positional zero (\), as the Babylonians had, there is some debate whether this glyph represented an actual zero.364 For Carl Boyer and Uta Merzbach tell us that it was not until 876 CE that the Hindus had the brilliant idea of using a sign for zero, having realized two centuries earlier that in a positional decimal system, only nine ciphers are needed. The Hindus thus laid down the three basic principles of numeration and numerography we have today: (1) a decimal base; (2) a positional notation; and (3) a ciphered form for each of the ten numerals.365 Of the other Alexandrian mathematicians, two are of particular note. First Eratosthenes (275–194 BCE), director of the library, developed a calendar with an intercalary day every fourth year to account for the fact that the length of the year is approximately 365¼ days, which was adopted by the Romans, and used even to this day. Eratosthenes also collected and integrated all available historical and geographical knowledge, making maps of the entire universe known to the Greeks.366 So even as the analytical mind was accumulating more and more knowledge of the world we live in, the convergent tendencies of evolution were still apparent. Secondly, Hipparchus (c. 190–c. 120 BCE) developed a table of chords in a circle, in a document that is now lost,367 giving trigonometric values for angles that led the Hindus368 and Arabs369 to develop what we know today as the trigonometric functions: sine, cosine, and tangent.370 Using the fact that the ratio of the sides of similar right-angled triangles is constant, Hipparchus then used his tables of chords to calculate the height of a mountain, the radius of the Earth, and the distance of the Earth to the Moon, the last using the method of locating points on the surface of the Earth by means of latitude and longitude that he had invented.371 While these calculations are interesting in themselves, what is of far more significance is that they simply illustrate the way that the mind can visualize the relationships between objects in the world around us, some of which we cannot see in their entirety. For instance, to calculate the distance from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the Moon, Hipparchus CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 857 would need to have drawn a diagram something like Figure 11.24:372 C

A B

Moon

Earth Figure 11.24: Using visualization to calculate distance to the moon We take such diagrams for granted today, but we need to remember that our ability to create such abstractions is fundamental to human learning. Other examples of such models are the pictures of the solar system created by the ancient Greeks. For instance, Aristarchus (310– c. 230 BCE), known as the ‘Greek Copernicus’, visualized a heliocentric view of the planets, a view that was rejected by Aristotle and the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Ptole- my (83–c. 168 CE), who favoured a geocentric perspective. In between, Herakleides (387–312 BCE) took the view that the inner planets—Mercury and Venus—circulated around the Sun, while the others go round the Earth.373 The key point about these models is that they illustrate the point that our minds create our reality, as the New Age movement knows only too well today. Yet some philosophers of science continue to believe in the existence of an objective reality separate from a knowing being,374 a symptom of our split minds. This becomes crystal clear when we allow the dual- isms that philosophers delight in—such as objectivism and subjectivism or individualism and realism and idealism—to dissolve in Consciousness, in the seamless, borderless continuum that is ineffable, nondual, all-inclusive Wholeness. This brings us to another significant Hellenic figure, that of Plotinus (205–270 BCE), who went to Alexandria in his twenty-eighth year to study philosophy with the most eminent professors in the city at the time, which reduced him to a state of complete depression, a clear sign of the widening gap between the intellect and intelligence and between rationality and mysticism. Eventually, he found a teacher in Ammonius Saccas, with whom he stayed for the next eleven years, saying, “This is the man I was looking for.”375 Both are credited as the founders of what Thomas Taylor called Neoplatonism around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.376 Plotinus then attempted to go east to study Persian and Indian philosophy, but never made it because Gordian III, the Roman Emperor with whom he was travelling, was killed in Mesopotamia. Eventually, Plotinus made his way to Rome,377 where he spent most of the remaining twenty-five years of his live reviving and developing Plato’s philosophy, although 858 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY it incorporated important Aristotelian and Stoic elements as well.378 There is no need to dwell on the details of Neoplatonism for Integral Relational Logic and the Unified Relationships Theory have not evolved directly from these ancient Greek philosophies. By starting afresh at the very beginning, IRL and the URT emerged in consciousness knowing little of their predecessors. We can simply observe that Plotinus is noted for saying, “Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.”379 On the face of it, this is a valid vision of human phylogeny, indicating that Plotinus saw that the ultimate goal of human development is to return Home to Paradise in complete union with both the Cosmos and the Divine viewed as Consciousness. However, this statement is not entirely true; it is only true from the perspective of the secondary, horizontal dimension of time. As noted in the Prologue to Part III of this book, when we include the primary, vertical dimension of time, we can see that we human beings, both as individuals and as a species, are conceived in Paradise. Any model of human development as a whole must therefore similarly begin at our Divine Source in the Eternal Now. Human evolution is thus the outward movement away from the Alpha point until we reach evolution’s glorious culmination at the Ome- ga point. Evolution then turns round on itself, becoming involution, the return to Paradise. We look at this integral vision in more detail in Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1027.

The birth of Christianity We now come to one of the most sensitive issues in this book, but one that must be addressed openly and honestly if humanity is to have any chance of adapting to the unprecedented rates of change we are experiencing today as evolution passes through the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year history: its accumulation point, in systems theory terms. For while Jesus of Nazareth was a mystic living in Paradise, in what he called the Kingdom of Heaven, his words have been more distorted and misunderstood than any of the other great teachers through the history of human learning. It is not unusual for the teachings of pioneering individuals to be misinterpreted by those who do not have the depth of understanding of the originators. For instance, according to Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx wrote in a letter, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”380 In a similar fashion, Carl Jung distanced himself from his followers when he said, “Thank God I am Jung and not a Jungian!”381 In the case of the mystics in whose titular names organized religions were formed, it is vitally important to remember that neither Siddhartha Gautama nor Jesus reached Nirvana by following the scriptures of the Churches. Jesus Christ was not a Christian any more than Shakyamuni Buddha was a Buddhist. The central point here is that while we are all on a unique journey through life, we all share the same Cosmic Context, which is Consciousness, and the same Divine Essence, which is CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 859 Love. As Heraclitus said, “This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.”382 Teachers in the East came closest to this view of our common Context and Essence with their notions of Brahman, Shunyata, and Tao, from which we are not separate for a single instant in our lives. But Jesus taught within a Jew- ish culture that believed that God is other, that human beings are created in the image of God, very far from Reality and the Truth. Today, with the awakening of Consciousness, a great spiritual renaissance is taking place around the world, which has many similarities with the birth of Western civilization following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. One of the principal reasons why Western civilization is now dying is that the founding fathers of Christianity suppressed the Gospel of Thomas in favour of the Gospel of John. They did this because Thomas, quoting Jesus’ words, said that the divine light that illuminates the whole universe is within every human being, and not exclusively within Jesus of Nazareth, as John claimed. This is not only a Christian issue. For hundreds and thousands of years, the three monotheistic religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have regarded God as other. As F. C. Happold points out in Mysticism, “To Jew, Christian, and Moslem, a gulf is felt to exist between God and man, Creator and created, which can never be crossed. To assert that ‘Thou’ art ‘That’ [as Hindus do] sounds blasphemous.”383 Similarly, Elaine Pagels points out, “Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from its creator: God is wholly other.”384 So the mystics of these religions have needed to be very careful about what they said if they were not to incur the wrath of the Church authorities. As Pagels tells us in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, “Even the mystics of Jewish and Christian tradition … often are careful to acknowledge the abyss that separates them from their divine Source.”385 So the mystics in the monotheistic religions have often been at odds with the theological teachings of their religions. For instance, Yehuda Berg tells us in The Power of Kabbalah that the Zohar, the primary Kabbalistic text, “warned that the ‘governing religious authority’ would always try to prevent the people from claiming the spiritual power that was rightly theirs.” Such authorities would “act as an intermediary between man and the divine”. For if they allowed people to “connect directly to the infinite, boundless Light of Creation” that “would mean their demise as gatekeepers to heaven”.386 In contrast, ever since the Aryans moved from central Asia thousands of years ago into the Indus valley, in what is now Pakistan, Rishis and other spiritual seekers in the East have known the Absolute in their own direct experience, a mystical inner knowing that is acknowledged by Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists but denied by the organized religions in the West. Nisargadatta Maharaj’s book I Am That, introduced to me by an Advaita sage as the only spiritual book you need to read,387 and Nukunu’s book Words of Fire: Commentaries on the Gospel 860 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY of Thomas well illustrate the fact that the Truth is the same for all of us.388 Jesus was a mystic who knew the Truth. As he famously said, “If you continue in my word, then are you my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”389 In a similar fashion, J. Krishnamurti said in 1929, when dissolving the organization that wanted to make him a World Teacher, “I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … Truth, being lim- itless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized.”390 In the years immediately following Jesus’ death, a multitude of Christian sects sprang up that were far from being organized. Not only were people initiated into the Christian faith, they were often baptized a second time into a particular sect.391 One of these sects was a group called Thomas Christians, whose leader was Judas Thomas, one of the twelve disciples, known as ‘the twin’, Thomas being Aramaic for twin.392 These people were known as Gnos- tics, a name that clearly denotes the difference between them and the other sects. As Osho said in his discourses, theists and atheists are people who believe and do not believe in God; agnostics are those who do not know what to believe; and gnostics are those who do not need to believe, for they know the Truth in their own direct experience.393 Gnostic derives from the Greek gnosis, ‘knowledge, wisdom’, cognate with both know in English and jnana in Sanskrit, meaning ‘spiritual wisdom and illumination, inner knowing of Ultimate Reality’. As Elaine Pagels tells us, John probably wrote his gospel in the last decade of the first century to refute the teachings of the Thomas Christians. John is particularly critical of Thomas, the one called Didymus (Greek for twin). He invented the character of doubting Thomas, perhaps as a way of caricaturing a revered teacher who he regarded as faithless and false.394 In contrast, Saying 13 in the Gospel of Thomas shows clearly that Thomas was the one disciple who was closest to Jesus.395 In the second century, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, now Izmir in Turkey, sought to unify the multitude of Christian communities that then existed, hoping “that Christians everywhere would come to see themselves as members of a single church that they called catholic, which means ‘universal’,”396 katholikos in Greek, from kata ‘in respect of’ and holos ‘whole’. Polycarp’s protégé, Irenaeus, who became bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, now Lyon in France, took up this unifying cause for much of the second century,397 miraculously escaping martyrdom, unlike so many of his contemporaries. In simple terms, Irenaeus based his unifying theology on the principle that Jesus, alone, is divine, expressed most clearly in John’s gospel, and that no one else can realize Christ consciousness. John thought that Jesus was “the only begotten Son of God”,398 beginning his gospel with these words: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.”399 In this case, Logos means ‘the immanent and rational conception of divine intelligence governing the Cosmos’,400 in the terms of Heraclitus, the mystical philoso- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 861 pher of change, analogous to Dharma and Tao in the East, rather than word, the usual mundane translation. Even though Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,”401 John said, “The world did not recognize it.”402 Thus, because that divine light was not available to those ‘in the world’, John said, “The Logos was [exclusively] made flesh, and dwelt among us.”403 In contrast, Thomas wrote in his gnostic gospel that Jesus said in Saying 24, “There is a light within a person of light, and it lights up the whole world.”404 There are many other sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas that show that Jesus did not claim that he was exclusively divine. These include: Saying 94, “One who seeks will find; for one who knocks it will be opened;”405 Saying 5, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed;”406 and Saying 49, “Blessed are those who are solitary and chosen, for you will find the Kingdom. For you have come from it, and you will return there again.”407 In the event, the proponents of John’s Gospel won the day. In 325 CE, the Roman emperor Constantine, who had converted to Christianity thirteen years earlier, convened a council at Nicaea in Turkey to “work out a standard formulation of Christian faith”.408 The bishops there formulated the Nicene Creed, which denies people’s natural gnostic experiences, as these opening words clearly indicate: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.”409 Then in 367 CE, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, issued an Easter letter demanding that Egyptian monks destroy the ‘secret writings’,410 including the Gospel of Thomas, which Irenaeus had denounced two hundred years earlier. Only the books that today constitute the New Testament were acceptable and canonical, from canon, a carpenter’s term meaning ‘guideline’.411 However, everyone did not obey this command, as Elaine Pagels tells us: But someone—perhaps monks at the monastery of St. Pachomius—gathered dozens of the books Athanasius wanted to burn, removed them from the monastery library, sealed them in a heavy, six-foot jar, and intending to hide them, buried them on a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi. There an Egyptian villager named Muhammad Ali stumbled on them sixteen hundred years later [in 1945].412 The Gospel of Thomas is but a tiny proportion (about a quarter of one percent) of what has come to be known as The Nag Hammadi Library,413 written in Coptic, the language of Egypt at the time. Its discovery has shed fresh light on the early years of Christianity, not the least on the role of Paul in the Church. As Elaine Pagels tells us, “Whoever knows contemporary New Testament scholarship knows Paul as the opponent of gnostic heresy. Paul writes his letters, especially the Corinthian and Philippian correspondence, to attack gnosticism and to refute the claims of gnostic Christians to ‘secret wisdom’.”414 But as she has discovered, this is not how the Gnostics saw Paul in the second century. To them, his letters were a primary source of gnostic theology.415 The key point here is that Paul 862 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY was conscious of the distinction between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of spiritual practice, addressing his teachings “both to the Greeks and barbarians; both to the wise, and to the un- wise”.416 Pagels adds that the Gnostics knew the wise and foolish as pneumatics and psychics, respectively,417 two levels of initiation in Gnostic Christianity, as Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy tell us, listed in Table 11.14:418 Level of Initiation Level of Identity Gnostic Description Element Hylic Physical Body Earth Psychic Psychological Counterfeit-spirit Water Pneumatic Spiritual Spirit Air Gnostic Mystical Light-power Fire Table 11.14: Levels of initiation in Christianity The first two levels are the most superficial, focused on the body and mind, which Freke and Gandy call the school of the ‘literalists’, those who interpret the scripture literally,419 the basis of the organized Church. In contrast, the Gnostics, on the return journey to the Source, have a much more profound understanding of the scriptures, utterly aware that they are not separate from the Divine for a single instant in their lives, sharing essentially the same understanding with other mystics. It is pertinent to note that even in the latter case there are levels of understanding. Indeed, as we go deeper and deeper into ourselves, we realize that there is no limit to the depths to which we can go, taking us very far from the exoteric religions. This brings us to one of the distinctive features of Christian theology, the belief in original sin, that “everyone is born as a result of the fall of Adam”.420 Paul is usually credited with this doctrine, later reinforced and reinterpreted by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, respectively,421 when he said, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”422 In the original Greek, man was anthropou, genitive of anthropos ‘human’, which corresponds to Hebrew adam ‘human, being, man, humanity’. So from a gnostic perspective, Adam is not to be taken literally. Indeed, the Gnostics knew Jesus as the son (uios) of man (anthropou),423 not exclusively the Son of God. Paul seems to recognize here that human ontogeny and phylogeny match each other, a central theme of this book. And there is both a gnostic and literalist resolution to sin and death, as Pagels explains. Paul went on to say, “That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace (charis, charisma) reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”424 But did the gnostic Valentinians interpret this literally? Well, it seems that they did not, for they identified the saviour and the pneumatic elect as being essentially identical.425 We can conquer death through the realization of Christ consciousness. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 863 But the literalists did not see Paul’s writings in this way. In particular, Augustine went on to equate sexual desire with sin,426 inducing a guilt complex about our most natural energies. It really is quite extraordinary that Christians can apparently look at a new-born baby and say that such a beautiful, innocent being is inherently sinful. Nevertheless, for hundreds of years, parents have been taking their infant children to church, where the priest has said some such words as: Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin: and that our Saviour Christ saith, None can enter the kingdom of God, except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost: I beseech you to call upon God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous mercy he will grant to this Child that thing which by nature he cannot have: that he may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy Church, and be made a lively member of the same.427 It was in such a literalist way that Christianity became established on the God first pillar of unwisdom, like Judaism before and Islam afterwards, suppressing the mystical teachings of the Gnostics in their midst. The priests thus formed a barrier between God and the people, telling them that God is other, having power over them through fear and guilt, for whenever there is Priests separation, there is fear. So Christianity is a religion diametrically opposite to Buddhism. The purpose of the latter is to help its follows to realize Bud- dha consciousness, while the central purpose of Christianity is to prevent its People followers from realizing Christ consciousness, quite the most extraordinary situation in the whole of human history. 11.25: Priestly separation Furthermore, as Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy point out, Christian theology has borrowed much from the pagan religions that Christians sought to overthrow. Pagan derives from Latin paganas ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to miles ‘soldier, one of the army’. “The Christians called themselves milites ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his militant church, and applied to non-Christians the term applied by soldiers to all who were ‘not enrolled in the army’.”428 Another derogatory term for non- Christian is heathen ‘someone who lives on the heath’, by implication uncivilized and savage, in comparison with those living in cities.429 So etymologically, to live in Love and Peace, close to Nature, is regarded as unchristian. Freke and Gandy tell us that the pagan religions “had exoteric Outer Mysteries, consisting of myths which were common knowledge and rituals which were open to anyone who wanted to participate. There were also esoteric Inner Mysteries, which were a sacred secret only known to those who had undergone a powerful process of initiation.”430 “At the heart of the Mysteries were myths concerning a dying and resurrecting godman, who was known by many different names. In Egypt he was Osiris, in Greece Dionysus, in Asia Minor Attis, in Syria 864 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Adonis, in Italy Bacchus, in Persia Mithras. Fundamentally all these godmen are the same mythical being,” which Freke and Gandy refer to as ‘Osiris-Dionysus’.431 Specifically, Dio- nysus was “essentially the god of vine, of wine, and of mystical ecstasy”.432 As they say, the myth of Osiris-Dionysus took many forms, but was essentially the same story, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Bernstein’s West Side Story. Freke and Gandy offer ten similarities between the story of Jesus, presented by the Christians, and the Osiris- Dionysus myth, including “Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the saviour and ‘Son of God’,” “His father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin,” and “His death and resurrection are celebrated by a ritual meal of bread and wine which symbolizes his body and blood.”433 Similarly, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford point out, “Mary is the unrecognized Mother Goddess of the Christian tradition,” both virgin and mother giving birth to a half-human, half-divine child, like the goddesses before her: Cybele, Aphrodite, Demeter, Astarte, Isis (the mother of Horus), Hathor, Inannas, and Ishtar.434 The supposed birthday of Jesus can similarly be traced to the pagan religions. “The annual celebration of nativity of the Mystery godman celebrated the death of the old year and its miraculous rebirth as the new year of the solstice,” either the 21st or 22nd December in the Gre- gorian calendar. But until this calendar became established, there was some confusion about dates. For instance, the birth of Mithras (and Horus)435 is celebrated on 25th December and that of Aion, another manifestation of Osiris-Dionysus, on 6th January, both dates celebrated as the birth of Jesus in different Christian denominations.436 We should not really be surprised by all these similarities, for in the abstract there is only one, archetypical human story, which each of us is living in our own way. When the evolution of the mind was still in its infancy, these stories gave rise to the myths of the heroes in the fairy tales of the various cultures in the world. Today, with the awakening of consciousness, we should be able to see these stories for what they are, putting the superstitions of our forebears behind us. Yet, this is still not happening except within a comparatively small, intelligent minority. Even today, Western religious leaders are perpetuating this split between the Divine ansd the individual, leading inevitably to schizoid behaviour out of touch with Reality. For instance, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Faith and Reason, said that if reason is to be fully true to itself, it must be grounded in the “fear of God”.437 But why be afraid? God is Love. And when we truly know God, when there is no other, no divisions in Consciousness, all fear disappears. Then Love, pure Love, is revealed, as the mystic poets, such as Rumi and Kabir, have expressed most beautifully. And as recently as 3rd February 2003, the Vatican published a report on the Catholic view of the New Age movement, Jesus Christ, The Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the ‘New Age’, the title being an obvious reference to the Age of Aquarius. The central issue CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 865 of this report is: “Man is essentially a creature and remains so for all eternity, so the absorption of the human I in the divine I will never be possible.”438 So the Roman Catholic Church is very far from being universal. It, like the other monotheistic religions, is based on exclusivity, which can only lead to holy wars, fundamentalist wars about the Whole, which in the extreme lead to terrorism. Even now in the twenty-first century, these wars are causing much pain and suffering in the world. Jesus, as a rebel living in a Jewish culture, was well aware of this problem. In Saying 101 in the Gospel of Thomas, he said, “Whoever does not hate father and mother as I do cannot be my follower, and whoever does not love father and mother as I do cannot be my follower. For my mother gave me falsehood, but my true mother gave me life.”439 And in Saying 31, which also appears in all four gospels in the Bible, Jesus said, “A prophet is not acceptable in the prophet’s own town.”440 Jesus was also very well aware of the difficulty in communicating his mystical experiences, for in several sayings in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “Whoever has ears should hear,” which has many parallels in the four Biblical gospels, indicating that what Jesus is endeavouring to transmit in words is not always easy to communicate. It is vitally important to note here that although we live in a world of celebrities, authorities, and experts, what is said is less important than who says it. Young children, who have not yet been thoroughly conditioned by the culture into which they were born, often have an innocent wisdom that their parents have lost. So it does not really matter whether the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thom- as were actually said by him or not. On this point, the Scholars Version of the Gospel of Thom- as in The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus categorizes all Jesus’ sayings into four groups: those that the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar think were definitely said and not said by Jesus himself, with maybe and doubtful in between.441 Only three sayings in the Gospel of Thomas were put into the first category: numbers 20, 54, and 100. But is this really relevant? Jesus, Thomas, and the Thomas Christians were all gnostics having direct inner knowing of the Divine. The suppression of the Gospel of Thomas and the other gnostic writings by the founding fathers of Christianity is not just a spiritual matter; it is also a major scientific and economic issue. When God is other, it is but a small step to seeing Nature as other, to be exploited and controlled for the selfish needs of human beings, the result being the ecological disaster that we are witnessing today. And when Nature is other, it is but another small step to seeing our fellow human beings as other. Hence the ferocious competitiveness and rampant consumer- ism of the global economy, which is the fear-driven cause of global warming, the debt crisis, and so many other ills in today’s grievously sick society. It is thus abundantly clear that the only practical way forward for humanity is to recognize that Love is the Divine Essence that we all share. As John the Evangelist wrote in his first epis- 866 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY tle, “God is love; and he that abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”442 Pope Benedict XVI took these words as the text for his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, published on 25th January 2006, saying that these words “express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Chris- tian faith”.443 But why are they exclusively Christian or even Catholic? We are all Love, no matter what our religious beliefs might be. Despite the great schism of the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe in the eleventh century and the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe in the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church is still the most influential Christian denomination, followed by half those who call themeselves ‘Christian’, about a third of the global population.444 Everything that the Pope says or does is headline news around the world. It is a really calamitous situation, perhaps the greatest impediment to Peace in the world today. We are still living in the Dark Ages, which the Christian suppression of Gnosticism and Platonism plunged Europe into. Al- though philosophy is today regarded as a footnote to Platonism and we can once again build brick houses, the Anglo-Saxons in Europe, at least, lost this ability, if they ever had it, at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Zen and Advaita About the same time as the founding fathers of Christianity were suppressing the Gnostics, who knew the Truth in their own direct experience, two figures in the East took Buddhism and Hinduism to even greater depths. The first was Bodhidharma, an Indian monk who is credited with the establishment of the Ch’an sect of Buddhism in China—Zen in Japanese— maybe in the sixth century CE. Secondly, Shankara, also called Shankaracharya, who lived from 788–820 CE, just thirty-two years, founded Advaita ‘not-two’ by studying the way that the Nondual essence of the Upanishads reflected his own mystical experiences. Zen and Advaita are not really religions or philosophies in a Western sense, for they are firmly based on human experience, with nothing to believe. Zen and Advaita are essentially ways of life,445 called ways of liberation in the East.446 As Christmas Humphreys, a British judge and founder of the Buddhist Society in the UK, says, the sole purpose of Zen practice is the realization of Nonduality. This is not something for the intellect. “Philosophers can miss it utterly; few psychologists lift their eyes to where it dwells, and saints fall far short of it; for all these move and have their being in a world of duality.”447 And as Shankaracharya said, “Liberation is not to be achieved through endless cycles of time by reading the scriptures or worshipping the gods or by anything else than knowledge of the unity of Brahman and atman.”448 Yet paradoxically Zen and Advaita have generated a wealth of writings and techniques that we do not really need to dwell on, for they can take us away from the Truth. Nevertheless, as Bodhidharma and Shankaracharya are important figures in human liberation, let us briefly look at their lives. Bodhidharma, whose name we can say means ‘Awak- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 867 ened Essence’, is more a legendary than a historical figure. Most authorities say that he was born in India about 470 CE and died in China in 543, although not all the stories of his life correspond to these dates.449 Bodhidharma was the twenty-eighth patriarch in the Buddhist lineage, after Shakyamuni Buddha, the first two patriarchs being Mahakashyapa and Ananda, the latter being Gauta- ma’s cousin, his name meaning ‘Bliss’, ‘Absolute Joy’. It is curious that teachings that are intended to transcend time and so free us from the fear of death should place so much emphasis on the horizontal dimension of time, which is just an illusion, an appearance in Conscious- ness. But most spiritual traditions stress the passing on of the teachings from one generation to another, which can inhibit us from reaching our fullest potential as divine, cosmic human beings. For instance, the major Christian denominations believe that the authority of the priests and bishops is handed down through Apostolic Succession: ordination or consecration by the laying on of hands.450 Buddhists have a similar ordination ritual for nuns and monks joining the sangha.451 And of course, it is well-known that Tenzin Gyatso is the fourteenth incarna- tion of the Dalai Lama, the first being Gendrun Drub (1391–1475).452 The story of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism in the sixth or fifth century BCE, which renounced the authority of the Vedas, is rather curious. Mahavira ‘Great Hero’ was the last of twenty-four Tirthankaras, stretching back into the mists of the early years of human evolution.453 According to tradition, Bodhidharma travelled from south India to south China and after meeting with no success in his missionary endeavour moved north where he spent nine years in unmovable zazen, from za ‘sitting’ and zen ‘absorption’ in a period called menpeki-kunen ‘nine years in front of the wall’. It seems that Bodhidharma wished to return to the forms of meditation described in the Mahayana sutras, especially the Lankavatara-sutra, with its emphasis on dhyana ‘meditation, absorption’ in Sanskrit, the origin of the ch’an and zen in Chi- nese and Japanese, respectively.454 After nine years meditating at Shao-Lin Monastery, Bodhidharma apparently became homesick for India and wished to return there. But before doing so, he wished to test the level of realization of his disciples. Bodhidharma’s replies well illustrate the depth of his and their understanding: 1. The first disciple said, “The way I understand it, if we want to realize the Truth we should neither depend entirely on words nor entirely do away with words; rather we should use them as a tool on the Way.” Bodhidharma replied, “You have grasped my skin.” 2. A nun said, “As I understand it, the Truth is an auspicious display of the Buddha- paradise; one sees it once, then never again.” Bodhidharma replied to her, “You have grasped my flesh.” 868 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY 3. The third disciple said, “The four great elements are empty and the five skandhas ‘aggregates’ are nonexistent.” Bodhidharma replied, “You have grasped my bones.” 4. Finally, Hui-k’o said nothing, only bowing to the master in silence. To him Bodhidharma said, “You have grasped my marrow.”455 Alan Watts tells us that the origins of Zen are as much Taoist as Buddhist, particularly the notion of wu-wei ‘not-making’, wei meaning approximately what we mean by growing.456 We can thus interpret wei as the outward, evolutionary force that engages us in our busy lives, driving us away from the Source, while wu-wei is the involutionary return to the Source by nondoing with no-mind. Zazen is a particularly rigorous practice for discovering our True Nature. It is not really meditation in the sense of vipassana, which focuses attention on an object, like the breath. Rather, zazen “is intended to free the mind from bondage to any thought-form, vision, thing, or representation, however sublime or holy it might be”.457 Despite this, Ch’an evolved into several schools of which two survive today in Japan as Zen, Ch’an having disappeared from China, like Buddhism splitting into Hinayana ‘Small Vehicle’, including Theravada ‘Teaching of the Elders’, and Mahayana ‘Great Vehicle. They are the Soto school, also called Mokusho Zen ‘Zen of silent enlightenment’, with its emphasis on posture and sitting still, and the Rinzai school, also called Kanna Zen ‘Zen of the contemplation of words’, using the paradoxical koan as the most important means of training on the way to kensho or satori.458 However, admirable as Zen practice might be, it cannot lead to Wholeness without becoming free of attachment to the practice. For we cannot realize the Timeless, free of the sense of a separate self, through any technique acting through time. As Osho said, you cannot become enlightened without meditation and you cannot become enlightened with meditation either. Satoris are essentially spontaneous. As Lao Tzu said, “Tao follows its own ways,”459 or in another translation, “The Tao’s principle is spontaneity.”460 Furthermore, while it is possible to be both a Zen Buddhist and a computer scientist working in business, we should not forget that the principal purpose of Zen practice is to be free of samsara ‘journeying’, the phe- nomenal world in which we live day to day. If we are to cocreate the Sharing Economy based on the Truth, we have no alternative but to start afresh at the very beginning, which, alone, allows us to return Home to Paradise, knowing that Wholeness is the unity of all opposites. While Zen is based very firmly on meditation, the principle technique in Advaita is self- inquiry by asking the most fundamental question any of us can ask ourselves: ‘Who am I?”. This process is called jnana-yoga, the path of abstract knowledge, which is naturally very close to Integral Relational Logic. By constantly applying the words neti, neti ‘not this, not this’, the practitioner eventually realizes the unity of Brahman and atman, knowing that who we truly are is not the body, the mind, the soul, or spirit. Those who realize the Truth in this way are called jnanis, those who know, not symbolically, but in the depths of their beings. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 869 Shankara, which means ‘he who brings blessings’461 or ‘one who confers happiness and welfare’,462 was very precocious, renouncing the world at just eight years of age in the search for the Truth. It seems that he was deeply concerned to restore the essence of Hinduism, described in the Upanishads, faced with the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. He thereby came to be called Shankaracharya, acharya meaning ‘one who sets the example’,463 or more simply ‘teacher’.464 Shankara the teacher wrote extensively on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, the most profound of the Hindu scriptures. But we do not need to dwell on these here, for they are simply manifestations of the perennial wisdom that underlies all the religions. But what is noteworthy is that Advaita was made into a religion called Advaita Vedanta. Vedanta derives from veda ‘knowledge’, sharing a PIE base with wise, and anta ‘end’, both words also having the same PIE base. Vedanta is thus the conclusion of the Vedas as contained in the Upanishads. But by making Vedanta a religion, its either-or opposite can also appear, denying the both-and mystical Truth of Advaita. Indeed, this is exactly what happened in the thirteenth century. Madva (1199–1278) postulated five distinctions, thus forming Dvaita-Ve- danta, not unlike the seven pillars of unwisdom that form the foundation of Western civilization today: 1. Between God and the individual soul. 2. Between God and matter. 3. Between the individual soul and matter. 4. Among individual souls. 5. Among the individual elements of matter.465 Madva thus took Advaita-Vedanta to its utmost opposite, following Ramanuja (c. 1055- 1137), who had formed Vishishtadvaita-Vedanta ‘qualified nondualism’, attempting to reconcile the Divine with the world of form, from vishishta, derived from vishesha ‘particularity, specificity’. Ramanuja espouses the view that God, as Brahman, is real and independent, but emphasizes that individual souls and the world are equally real but not independent.466 This is a half-truth. As the Unified Relationships Theory shows with the most impeccable reasoning, we are all one, but not separate from Consciousness, not real in an Absolute sense. Just as we are not separate from the Divine, the Ultimate Reality is not independent, not separate from any other being in the relativistic world of form. It is vitally important to note that Advaita, as Nonduality, as the Supreme Being, cannot be understood by the categorizing mind. The mind works by making comparisons. By the Principle of Unity, if Advaita is the thesis and Dvaita is the antithesis, Advaita is the synthesis, as Figure 11.26 illustrates. So all comparisons disappear in Advaita, and we are left with Peace, Perfect Love and Peace. Dividing Vedanta into three religious schools is thus completely missing the Essence of Advaita. Similarly, Nonduality cannot be the subject of com- 870 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY parative philosophy, of academic exposition, as David Loy, a practicing Zen Buddhist attempts to do.467 To illustrate this point, I once heard a spiritual teacher telling this story about H. W. L. Poonja (Papa- Advaita ji, 1910–1997), an Advaita sage. When a pandit, deeply learned in the scriptures, asked to attend one of his sat- sangs, Papaji said, “You are most welcome, but leave all your knowledge outside.” This might well be an apocryphal story, but it beautifully illustrates the way Advaita Dvaita that the analytical mind can take us away from Ineffa- ble, Nondual Wholeness and the Truth. Figure 11.26: Primacy of Advaita

The birth of Islam The word islam has a Proto-Semitic base *šlm meaning ‘to be whole, sound’, also the root of Hebrew shalom ‘well-being, peace’, from šālēm ‘to be safe, sound’. Islam itself means ‘submis- sion’ in Arabic, from ’aslama ‘to surrender, resign oneself’, from Syriac ’ailem ‘to make peace, surrender’, derived stem of šlem ‘to be complete’. Similarly, muslim is the active participle of ’aslama ‘one who surrenders’. So etymologically, at least, Islam has a sound, mystical base. But over the years, like the other monotheistic religions, the Muslims have sought to suppress the esoteric mysteries of Sufism, in favour of an exoteric interpretation of the Korân or Qur’an. How then did Islam come to stifle the Truth, leading to much conflict that we see in the world today? Well, here is a brief summary of the origins of Islam, mostly taken from The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Muhammad (570–632), which means ‘praiseworthy’, had some deep religious experiences at an early age, having a visitation by two angels who “opened his chest and stirred their hands inside”.468 In search of the Truth behind these experiences, he travelled from Mecca, where he was born, to Syria, where he met Jews and Christians teaching the monotheistic tradition of Abraham (Ibrahim), and an Arabic group called the Hanifs. This was in marked contrast to the polytheism of Mecca, where idols were revered, and which perhaps did not have the notion of Oneness that lies at the heart of polytheistic Hinduism. Struggling to reconcile his experiences with the bewildering conflict of religions and idols around him, Muhammad withdrew into a cave on Mount Hira, where he was called to “Re- cite, in the name of your Lord who creates, who creates man from a drop: Recite; for your Lord is the most generous, who teaches by the pen, teaches man what he knows not,”469 the opening words of Chapter 96 in the Qur’an. Chronologically, this is the first of 114 chapters to be written down, chapters being known as suras and verses as ayat, singular aya.470 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 871 At first, Muhammad believed that he had gone insane and thought of killing himself. But his wife, Khadijah, found him and encouraged him to declare “that if God is God, there cannot be a God of the Christians, a God of the Jews, still less can there be the many deities of Mecca.”471 This is impeccable logic, of course. As we saw in Section ‘The Absolute Whole’ in Chapter 4, ‘Transcending the Categories’ on page 244, where we established God as a scientific concept, there can be only one Absolute by definition, for if there were more than one, they would be relative to each other, not Absolute. And as the mystics have found over the millennia, to test this concept in experience, it is necessary to live in union with the Divine, completely free of the sense of a separate self. In this exquisitely elegant manner, we can establish both the existence and the reality of the Absolute in conformity with both the coher- ence and correspondence theories of truth in the philosophy of science. With the certain knowledge that there is only one God that we all share, Muhammad took the next logical step. As all creation is derived from this one God, all humans should live in corresponding unity, in what he called ’umma in Arabic, usually translated as ‘community’ or ‘nation’. Islam is thus the quest for the realization of ’umma, under God.472 This is the central vision of Islam, shared with many others seeking to discover how we can end conflict and suffering and learn to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other. As Muhammad said, “Humanity was a single ’umma [‘nation’]. Then they fell into divisions. If a word had not previously gone out from your Lord, the matter would have been decided, concerning which they disagreed.”473 But now Muhammad’s reasoning broke down, moving away from the root meaning of Is- lam: ‘to be whole and complete’. Rather than viewing humanity as a whole, he divided people into believers and unbelievers, being referenced in the Qur’an 175 and 125 times, respectively.474 As he said, “You are the best of the nations [’umma] raised up for (the benefit of) men; you enjoin what is right and forbid the wrong and believe in Allah; and if the followers of the Book had believed it would have been better for them; of them (some) are believers and most of them are transgressors.”475 Not surprisingly, the Meccans violently resisted this message and became very hostile to Muhammad and his followers. For humanity was still in childhood in its phylogeny. It would take many more centuries before evolution could heal the deep wound in the human psyche, which is the root cause of all conflict and suffering in the world. As we can now see, to be whole, healthy, and holy, it is necessary to unify Eastern and Western ways of searching for the Truth. In seeking to come in union with the Divine, Eastern mystics most often use the word Awareness, which arises through self-reflective Intelligence, often called the Witness, the eye- sight of Consciousness, which is the radiant light shining constantly through all of us once the clouds of unknowing are dispersed. However, Muhammad did not use the word Aware- 872 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ness in the Qur’an, although aware appears forty-seven times. Rather, Muhammad described his experiences as a Revelation from Allah, using revelation twenty-two times and the verb reveal 216 times. “The revelations were clearly distinguished from the words that Muhammad spoke as a man, both through his changed experience, and through the entirely different style of the utterance—rhythmic and tied loosely by rhyme, and without exact precedent in the Arabian context.”476 It seems from this that Muhammad experienced some form of altered state of consciousness, not unlike many others who feel that the Divine possesses them, whether this be beneficent or detrimental. He did not recognize that Consciousness is all there is and that none of us is separate from the Divine for a single instant in our lives. Rather, for Muhammad, God is other; there is a great gulf between the Divine and humanity that can never be bridged, a Judaic and Christian notion that can only lead to fear and conflict. This belief arose despite the fact that Muhammad recognized that Allah becomes manifest in human consciousness in a variety of ways, called the ‘Ninety-nine beautiful names of God’: “God has the most excellent names: therefore call on him by the same.”477 For instance, all suras except the ninth begin with the words “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent (Ar-Rah- man), the Merciful (Ar-Rahim).” God is also the Creator (Al-Khaliq), the Destroyer (Al-Mu- mit), and the Preserver (Al-Hafiz),478 which correspond to Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu in Hinduism. Allah is also Alpha and Omega: “He is the First and the Last and the Ascendant (over all) and the Knower of hidden things, and He is Cognizant of all things.”479 Such names denote deities in the polytheistic religions, various manifestations of the Divine in human consciousness, often subconscious or even unconscious. But it seems that Muhammad did not see this relationship between humanity and the Divine. Rather, Muhammad saw himself as a prophet, whose root meaning, as we saw on page 815, is ‘one who speaks by divine inspiration or as the interpreter through whom the will of a god is expressed’, in succession to Abraham (Ibrahim) and Jesus (Isa). Indeed, according to his revelation, he became known as the last prophet and Islam became the one exclusive religion, despite Wholeness being all-inclusive, to replace all other religions, transcending not only the disunited tribes of Arabia but also all continuing divisions in the world in ’umma, as laid down in the Constitution of Medina.480 So despite its peaceful intentions, Islam was conceived in conflict. Indeed, Muhammad urged his followers to wage holy war—war about the Whole—against the infidels, from Latin infidelis ‘disloyal’ from in- ‘not’ and fidelis ‘faith’: “So do not follow the unbelievers, and strive against them a mighty striving with it.”481 Today, such a holy war is known as jihad, more fully jihad fi sabil Allah ‘striving in the cause of God’, from jihad ‘struggle’.482 One who engages in jihad is known as a mujahid ‘struggler’, the plural being mujahadeen. Today, mujahadeen has come to mean terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan,483 greatly corrupting CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 873 Muhammad’s original teaching. For jihad is divided into two categories: the greater and the lesser. The greater jihad is “warfare in oneself against any evil or temptation”. As such it is more a psychotherapeutic approach to mental health than a mystical one, for while a war continues to rage in the psyche, we cannot fully realize that Wholeness is the union of all opposites, including good and evil. The lesser jihad is the defence of Islam or of a Muslim country or community against aggres- sion. But Muhammad is careful to emphasize that such a war can only be defensive: In avenging injuries inflicted on us, do not harm nonbelligerents in their homes, spare the weakness of women, do not injure infants at the breast, nor those who are sick. Do not destroy the houses of those who offer no resistance, and do not destroy their means of subsistence, neither their fruit trees, nor their palms.484 Muhammad first recited the revelations he received from Allah, which were then written down in the Qur’an, probably derived from the Syriac qeryana ‘scripture reading’, from qara’a ‘to read, recite’. The earliest suras, revealed at Mecca, are the shortest, and so placed towards the end of the Qur’an because the suras are ordered roughly in diminishing lengths. These Meccan suras are mostly concerned with summoning Muslims to believe in Allah and in social justice. Allah is often referred to as the ‘Merciful’, but “stories of punishment of former disobedient and unbelieving peoples are prominent.”485 The longer and later suras were revealed at Medina following the withdrawal of Muham- mad and his followers from Mecca in 622, the first year in the Islamic calendar, known as AH 1, from anno hegirae ‘in the year of the hijra’, hijra meaning ‘withdrawal’. Medina simply means ‘city’, originally Madīnat(u) ’n-Nabiythe ‘city of the prophet’.486 It was there that the earliest organized forms of Islam took root. So the Medinan suras were increasingly concerned with practical issues of individual and social life,487 such as what to wear, what to eat, and about relationships between women and men. There is no need to get dragged into these moral issues, about which there is endless debate, taking us away from Love and Peace, Life and Freedom, and Wholeness and the Truth. Despite the central vision of Islam to create a peaceful ’umma, after Muhammad died the Muslim community disintegrated into Sunni and Shi’a Islam,488 a conflict that is raging even to this day. This schism arose because Arabic communities recognized two forms of leader- ship, one hereditary, the other by selecting the best man for an occasion. Although Muham- mad had eleven wives and at least two concubines, he had no son who survived into adulthood. His nearest male relative was his cousin Ali, who had married one of Muham- mad’s daughters. However, the Muslim community did not select Ali as the Caliph, from halafa ‘to succeed’. Rather they chose Abu Bakr by the nonhereditary method, considering him the best candidate for the job.489 874 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Abu Bakr became the first Caliph in Sunni Islam, from sunna ‘custom’,490 indicating words and actions following the example of Muhammad,491 the largest denomination of Is- lam today. Ali became the first of twelve Imams in Shi’a Islam, meaning ‘party’, the singular shi’i meaning ‘follower’ or ‘associate’ (of Ali), although the Sunnis also made him the fourth Caliph. Despite Muhammad’s intention not to wage war except in defence, the Islamic Em- pire had conquered much of Spain, Northern Africa, and the Indus Valley, as well as Arabia by the middle of the eighth century, as Figure 11.27 shows.492

Figure 11.27: Islamic Empire of the Caliphs in the seventh and eighth centuries The dark brown area shows the extent of the empire during Muhammad’s life, expanding from 622 to 632. The orange area, called the Rashidun Caliphate, further expanded the empire under Abu Bakr and his successors from 632 to 661, lasting until Ali’s death. Then from 661 to 750, the Islamic Empire expanded into the yellow area to form the Umayyad Caliphate, the third largest contiguous empire of all time with about 30% of the world’s population at the time,493 if we include the Iberian Peninsula, conquered by the Moors of North Africa. This empire then split into the Abbasid Caliphate and the Caliphate of Córdoba, the latter occupying Iberia, which the Arabs called Al-Andalus. It was from here that the ancient Greek writings re-entered Europe as we look at in Subsection ‘Attempting a reconciliation’ on page 884. The twelve Imams beginning with Ali are called the Twelvers (Ithna ’Ashariya), the majority branch of Shi’a Islam, and the official religion of modern Iran.494 The word imam means something different in Sunni Islam, most often a leader of prayers in the mosque, like a priest. Then, just like all the other authoritarian religions, lines of successors appeared as scholars and priests defining Islamic or Sharia law, Sharia meaning ‘the path worn by camels to the water’.495 Today these religious leaders have many titles, including Caliph, Ayatollah, Imam, Mullah, Mujtahid, Sheik, and Qadi, generally preventing Muslims from living freely and discovering the truth of human existence, sometimes brutally. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 875 However, unlike the founding fathers of Christianity, they could not prevent a minority of gnostics appearing in their midst, known as Sufis, with various etymologies, including ‘wool’, from the simple cloaks the early Muslim ascetics wore, and ‘purity’.496 While there is no inherent conflict between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of Islam, religious leaders have not infrequently felt threatened by Sufi mysticism.497 The most famous example was Mansur Hallaj, who was sentenced to death in Baghdad in 922 for declaring, “I am the Truth” (Ana’l- Haqq).498 His means of execution was even more severe than that usually meted out. He was ordered to be given “a thousand lashes; if he dies from them, chop off his head, and preserve it when you order his body burned; if not, stop the flagellation (after the thousandth blow), cut off one of his hands, then a foot, then the other hand and the other foot; and once the trunk is burned, display his head on the bridge.”499 Even today, “Sufis … still live hidden from orthodox Muslims.”500 Despite such cruelty, the Sufi poets have written some of the most beautiful poetry ever written, knowing in the depths of their beings that God is Love. Foremost among these was Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273), who was born in present-day Afghanistan but who lived most of his life in Konya in Anatolia, known as Rum, hence his name Rumi.501 Here is a poem translated from Persian by Daniel Liebert: in death, I lose a body and He will lose my phantasies of Him I go shirtless to this lovemaking my body becomes all soul every hairtip alive love, enter this body’s house or I must leave it to seek you my soul is a ship scudding the waves in pursuit of love be drunk on love for love is all that exists mother and father played at love and one such as you sprang from nothingness day and night are in love each has caught the other’s foot 876 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY and they go around at the sound of love’s flute even the dead tear apart their shrouds So far we have seen that Mohammad’s revelations in the Qur’an could be interpreted by either appealing to religious authorities or through mystical experience. However, in the Is- lamic Golden Age, also called the Islamic Renaissance,502 a number of philosophers attempted to do so through the power of reason.503 Of course, they were greatly hampered in this endeavour because Islam, like Christianity, forbids its followers to know the Truth that sets us free, as Jesus taught. So Islamic philosophy, like all schools of thought in cultures that are based on the first pillar of unwisdom, can only flounder on shifting sands, without a sound foundation. We therefore do not need to dwell on these philosophers for long. It is pertinent to note, however, that while Greek philosophy disappeared from Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christianity, these Greek works continued to exist in Arabia and Per- sia, many being translated into Arabic, including parts of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. So as the Muslims conquered these lands, they began to assimilate Greek, Jewish, and Christian philosophy into their Islamic worldview. Aristotle seems to have been a favourite, for Islamic philosophers established a Peripatetic tradition, named after Aristotle’s followers, who were called ‘peripatetics’ after his habit of walking while lecturing.504 Because the evolution of the mind was still in a comparatively early stage of development, these philosophers struggled to make sense of the world they lived in, constantly arguing among themselves on how best to ascertain the Truth, the causal nature of existence, and the relationship between humanity and the Divine.505 Foremost among these Islamic philosophers was Ibn Sina, known in the Latin world as ‘Avicenna’ (930–1037), who was later to have the largest influence on Western philosophers. Drawing on Aristotle, in particular, but also Plato and Plotinus, Avicenna argued that Allah created the world through emanation. In other words, the entire world of form issues from a Divine Source. But because God is other in Islam, Avicenna did not recognize that the Source is immanently present within every one of us. Rather, to him, God was Pure Thought, transcendent and distant from the world of everyday affairs.506 Such a schism has been afflicting the evolution of the mind every since, leading today to what Erich Fromm called our sick society. It is still a moot point on whether the power of Life, emanating from God, can collectively heal our fragmented, split minds before the human race becomes extinct. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 877 Other civilizations As well as the major civilizations that emerged in the Middle East, India, and China, Arnold Toynbee identifies a number of other civilizations in the Americas and Europe that we should briefly look at for completeness. While the Mayan and Andean civilizations, shown on the left in Figure 11.28,507 developed much later than the five primary civilizations in the old world, depicted on page 815, they were primary in the sense that they had no precursors. Af- ter the mysterious collapse of the Mayan civilization, two secondary new civilizations emerged called Mexic and Yucatec, shown on the right.508 These later merged into the Aztec Empire, which was brought to a brutal end by the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, as was the short-lived Inca Empire, the universal state for the Andean civilization. What is most interesting about these civilizations in the Americas is that they developed quite independently of those in Old World, yet had many similar characteristics. If is probable that humans entered the Americas from Siberia during the last glacial period in the eight to twenty-eight millennia preceding 12,000, when rising sea levels isolated the two American continents.509 There is not much to say about the Andean civilization, not the least because it was the only civilization that did not invent writing. We know it best, of course, through the amazing Incan cities that have since been discovered, such as Machu Picchu in present- day Peru, shown in Figure 11.29. We know much more about the Mayan civilization, which fascinates the New Age movement today because its sixteen billion-year calendar is due to end around 2012, as we saw in Section ‘The Mayan calendar’ in Chapter 6, ‘A Holistic Theory of Evolution’ on page 546, giving rise to what some believe will be a rapid explosion of love and consciousness around the world. Indeed, with the exception of the Brahmin civilization, the Mayans had a deeper sense of the vastness of cyclic and linear time than any other civilization. They felt deeply con- nected to the universe, developing structures and rituals that mirror the order of the Totality of Existence, the huge city of Teotihuacan being an example, which housed a population of around 200,000 people about 500 CE.510 But unlike the mystics of the East, it seems that the Mayans did not discover the vertical dimension of time—the Eternal Now—which is necessary if we are to live in full harmony with the Principle of Unity, free of fear, which so often leads to violence, and in the case of the Aztecs, much human sacrifice. For “the Aztecs believed that the Gods needed blood and the hearts of human victims to nourish them in the 878 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY forces of darkness.”511

Figure 11.28: Primary and secondary civilizations in the new world Toynbee also recognized three other civilizations, which he called ‘abortive’ because of “the strain of having to respond to a series of challenges which were excessive in their severi- ty”.512 These three civilizations were Far Western Christian, Far Eastern Christian, and Scan- dinavian. We can look briefly at the first and the last. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 879 The Far Western Christian civilization arose in the ‘Celtic Fringe’, mainly in Ireland, after about 375 CE.513 “Celtic Christianity is marked by a kind of heroic devotion, with a simplicity of prayer and art.”514 Indeed, “The Celts moulded Christianity to fit their own barbarian social heritage.”515 In this respect, it is interesting to note that the Neolithic Celts built spectacular structures516 and developed characteristic symbols517 as far back as the fourth millennium BCE. For instance, “The Megalithic Passage Tomb at Newgrange [depicted in Figure 11.30] was built about 3200 BCE. The kidney shaped mound covers an area of over one acre [4,000 m2] and is sur- Figure 11.29: Machu Picchu, an Incan city rounded by 97 kerbstones, some of which are richly decorated with megalithic art.”518 Of particular note is that at the winter solstice, the central passage and chamber are illuminated by the sunrise, indicating a relatively advanced understanding of astronomy and calendrical calculation, contemporary with and even earlier than the Sumeric and Egyptian civilizations.519 The abortive Far Western Christian civilization came to an end as the result of invasions by the Vikings in the ninth to eleventh centuries, by the ecclesiastical authority of Rome, and the political authority of England in the twelfth century.520 So let us look briefly at the abortive Scandinavian civilization, whose aesthetic ethos bears a remarkable resemblance to the Greek culture,521 not the least with its pagan gods and goddesses. Indeed, this influence is still to be seen in our language. For instance, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after the Norse/Germanic gods and goddesses Tyr, Odin/Wodan, Thor, and Frigg/Freyja, corresponding to the Roman Mars, Mercury, Ju- piter, and Venus, which in turn correspond to Greek Ares, Hermes, Zeus, and Aphrodite, respectively.522 On this point, it is interesting to note that free and friend have a Proto-Indo- European root *pri ‘to love’, also the root of Friday and the Swedish words frid ‘inner peace’ and fred ‘lack of war’. So every Friday, corresponding to the Roman day of Venus, the goddess 880 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY of love and beauty, is supposedly a day of peace. This is in contrast to Tuesday, which cele- brates Tyr, the Nordic god of war, corresponding to Mars’ day in the Roman calendar.

Figure 11.30: Megalithic Passage Tomb at Newgrange, Ireland While on the subject of deities, which are really psychospiritual energies within us, Norse mythology foretells the death of the gods, the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water, called Ragnarök.523 Richard Wagner’s Götter- dämmerung ‘twilight of the gods’, the fourth opera in the Nibelung’s Ring, is loosely based on this Norse myth.524 The Old Norse word ragnarök is a compound of two parts, ragna and rök. Ragna is the genitive plural of regin ‘gods’ or ‘ruling powers’, which has a Proto-Indo-European base *reg- ‘to move or direct in a straight line, to lead, to rule’, also the root of right, realm, regime, rich, raj, rail, regular, rule, rake, reckon, reckless, source, and many other words, a really rich etymology. The second part is rök, which has several meanings, such as ‘development, origin, cause, relation, fate, and end’, not to be confused with Swedish rök ‘smoke’, unless we regard smoke as denoting the end of something. However, Haraldur Bernharðsson argues that the words ragnarök and ragnarökkr are closely related, etymologically and semantically, and suggests a meaning of ‘renewal of the divine powers’.525 Ragnarök thus denotes the prophecies made in many cultures of the world of a breakdown of the old order and the emergence of a spiritual renaissance. It is therefore not surprising that Norse mythology, like Celtic, is of much interest to the New Age movement, searching for prophecies about the emerging New Humanity. My Swedish neighbours are particularly interested in Hel, a goddess presiding over a realm of the same name. In the poem Völuspá, the best-known poem of Poetic Edda, telling the story of the creation and the end of the world, a völva, a Nordic priestess, states that Hel will play an important role in Ragnarök. This is very strange, for the Old Norse word hel means ‘one who covers up or hides something’, from the Proto-Indo-European *kel- ‘to cover, conceal’ also the root of hell ‘concealed place’ and apocalypse from Greek apokaluptein ‘to uncover’. So CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 881 this etymology of hel does not indicate awakening, although hel and hela in modern Swedish coincidentally mean ‘whole’ and ‘to heal’, with a PIE base *kailo ‘whole, uninjured, of good omen’, also the root of whole, health, and holy, but not holistic, which has a PIE base *sol- ‘whole’. But then entering the Kingdom of Heaven can sometimes feel like Hell, as we experience the dark night of the soul. The Nordic myths have led to the study of the runic alphabet, a distinctive writing system used by the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons, most probably evolving from the Etruscan alphabet, which, in turn derived from the Greek. In Norse mythology, the runic alphabet is attested to a divine origin, the word rune originally meaning ‘mystery’526 because the people of Northern Europe attributed magic powers to the mysterious symbols scratched on armour, jewels, tombstones, and so forth.527 Runes were employed in casting spells, as to gain a kiss from a sweetheart or to make an enemy’s gut burst. In casting a spell the writing of the runes was accompanied by a mumbled or chanted prayer or curse, also called a rune, to make the magic work.528 The Scandinavian variants of the alphabet, which first appeared around 150 CE, are known as futhark or fuþark, where þ is the Icelandic character thorn,529 after the first six letters of the alphabet:530 fuþark ͓͕͙͛ͤͥ Figure 11.31 shows the Rök Runestone placed by the church in Rök, Östergötland, Sweden, regarded as the first piece of written Swedish literature, carved in stone around 800 CE.531 One of the few runic texts found on parchment was the Codex Runicus from about 1300, which includes the oldest preserved Nordic provincial law, Sca- nian Law, pertaining to Skåneland in southern Sweden, then governed 532 by the Danes. 11.31: Rök Runestone Medieval economics Not much need be said about medieval economics, for no major new concepts emerged in Europe during the period from 410 to 1485, as Glyn Davies tells us in his History of Money. Coins remained the basic facilitator for trade, although money in this form disappeared from the British Isles for about 200 years after the Romans left around 435, to be replaced by a barter economy, another reflection of the Dark Ages.533 Of interest here is the origin of the penny, the most basic coin in North-Western Europe. Davies suggests that penny derives from the ‘panning’ of coins, “when pouring the molten metal from crucibles into the ‘pans’ required for casting or for blanks of hammered coins”,534 882 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY although none of my etymological dictionaries give this derivation. In Germany, the penny was known as the pfennig, in use until the introduction of the Euro in 2002. And in modern Swedish, peng means ‘coin’, its plural pengar meaning ‘money’. In the eighth century, Charlemagne declared that 240 pennies or pfennigs should be minted from a pound of silver,535 a measure of weight and mass derived from the Roman libra, but of various weights in different countries, ranging from 300 to 500 grams.536 So I can blame Charlemagne for having to do arithmetic in pounds, shillings, and pence in the 1950s, abbreviated to £sd, from the Latin librae, solidi, and denarii, the last two denoting the Roman coins solidus and denarius. After 1971, when the pound sterling was decimalized, children in the UK no longer needed to do arithmetic in base 12 and 20 when doing financial calculations, although the UK, and other countries, most notably the USA, still holds on to ancient non-metric weights and measures, which is fun if not always very convenient. The OED tells us that £sd could humorously mean ‘L. S. Deism’, meaning ‘worship of money’, although I have never heard this expression. Nevertheless, many a true word is spoken in jest, as they say. In an uncertain world, we worship that which gives us a sense of security in life, turning both religious and economic beliefs into precarious immortality symbols, because we are taught that we can never base our lives on the Immortal Ground of Being that we all share, because only Jesus was both human and Divine.

Second Axial Period There is some debate about whether the end of the Middle Ages brought about a second Axial Period comparable with the first. As Karl Jaspers said, “Europe’s exceptional spiritual achieve- ments from 1500 to 1800, that outshine science and technology—Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Goethe, Spinoza, Kant, Bach, Mozart—challenge comparison with the Axial Period of two and a half millennia earlier. Is a second Axial Period to be discerned in these later centuries?”537 Jaspers’ answer was somewhat ambivalent. Even though “these centuries are the most fruitful period for us Europeans, … the purity and clarity, the ingenuousness and freshness of the worlds of the first axis are not repeated.” At best, the burgeoning of Western civilization could be thought as secondary to the first Axial Period, not only because it was a purely Eu- ropean phenomenon, but also because it suffered and connived at extraordinary distortions and aberrations because of increasing fragmentation. As Jaspers said, this is our own immediate historical matrix, with which we are alternatively at war and on intimate terms with.538 Most particularly, it was not until the twentieth century that figures emerged who were of the stature of Shakyamuni Buddha, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, from the first axial period. The reason for this is not hard to find. In retrospect, we can see that the seeds for the self-destruction of Western civilization were sown at its conception, at the Council of Nicaea CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 883 in 325, when the founding fathers of Christianity declared that Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, suppressing the Gnostic Gospels. As a consequence, the Roman Catholic Church forbad Christians from knowing the Truth, which sets them free, as Jesus taught. So being prevented from looking inwards, in order to know themselves, people turned outwards, in the most wonderful creativity, most particularly in the arts and sciences, but knowing little about the Ultimate Source of their works of art, discoveries, and inventions. I begin this section in what are called the late Middle Ages in the twelfth century, because it was at this time that Latin Europe rediscovered the Greeks, whose philosophies had been largely ignored for the previous few hundred years. For the awakening of the West from the Dark Ages began during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries during what Rich- ard E. Rubenstein called the ‘medieval renaissance’,539 prefiguring the Renaissance proper. The initial challenge was how to accommodate the pagan philosophy of Aristotle with Chris- tian theology, believing that Jesus is people’s redeemer. “In a world hungry for Whole- ness”,540 as Rubenstein put it, a great struggle began between faith and reason,541 which is still not resolved, leading to the great psychological, ecological, and economic crisis we face today. While the arts and sciences have created a measure of order out of the chaos, overall, the past nine hundred years have been a time of utter confusion, as people have struggled to reconcile their inner and outer worlds. What scientists and medical practitioners have been telling us about the world we live in seems to be in conflict with our spiritual experiences, which lie outside materialistic science as defined today. Nevertheless, while these developments took the evolution of the mind further and further away from Reality, they were a further manifestation of the accelerating pace of evolutionary development, absolutely essential for evolution to become fully conscious of itself within us human beings. So even though a great schism between reason and mysticism arose as a result, we can say that the second Axial Period was a necessary prerequisite to the third, which we are entering today, as the West discovers East, leading to the great spiritual renaissance we are witnessing today. By reunifying Eastern mysticism with Western reason—the two halves of human development over the past five thousand years—we can cocreate an epoch-making scientific revolution, necessary to bring about a superconscious, superintelligent society living in love, peace, and harmony, as the visionaries have prophesied.

Attempting a reconciliation The first steps at reconciling faith and reason were made within a philosophical framework called ‘scholasticism’, which the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the system of theology and philosophy taught in medieval European universities, based on Aristotelian logic and the writings of the early Christian Fathers and having a strong emphasis on tradition and dogma”. Scholastic theologians and teachers in the universities at this time were called 884 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ‘schoolmen’. The word school derives from skhole ‘leisure, spare time, peace, a holding back’, from a PIE base *segh ‘to hold’, also root of hectic, eunuch, scheme, and severe. So learning requires leisure, often not possible with today’s work ethic, which demands that people spend most of their time as fodder for the voracious appetite for the great economic machine. In essence, what these schoolmen were attempting to do was integrate the Christian view of God or the Absolute with that of humanity and the physical universe, misleadingly called ‘nature’, using revelation or faith, reason, and rarely mystical experience. This search for Wholeness took place during a time when the spiritual and secular princes were struggling for supremacy and with intense political competition in the universities among liberal arts masters and theologians, mendicants and secular clerics, and various student nations.542 At the end of this period (from 1378 to 1417),543 there were even two popes, one at Avignon, the other in Rome, each calling the other anti-pope, in what is called the Great Schism,544 not to be confused with the East-West schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Hanging over these deliberations was the threat of heresy, punishable by death. The word heresy derives from the Greek airesis ‘taking, choosing, choice, course taken, course of action or thought, school of thought, philosophic principle or set of principles, philosophical or religious sect’ from airein ‘to take’, from airisthai ‘to take for oneself, choose’. Airesis is used several times in the New Testament with its original Greek meaning. For instance, in Acts 5:17, the word is used to denote the sect of Sadducees. In 1 Corinthians 11:19, the word is translated as heresies in the King James Version of the English Bible, but in The New Study Bible, differences is used. It seems that the change of meaning from ‘religious sect, party, or faction’ to ‘doctrine at variance with the Catholic faith’ happened in Latin during the Middle Ages and was imported into English in the 1220s.545 Of course, it was a hopeless task, for the Christian belief that God is other forms the first pillar of unwisdom in Western civilization and Aristotle’s either-or, linear logic provides the seventh pillar. Although the Encyclopædia Britannica says that a great ‘knowledge explosion’ arose in Western Europe as the result of the translation of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific works,546 not surprisingly there was very little cohesion in these integrative endeavours. The scholastics were going round and round in circles, having neither a sound mystical foundation nor a coherent conceptual framework on which to build, such as is provided by Integral Relational Logic. However, we need to look at this confusion a little because this struggle lies deep in the cultural subconscious, partly explaining how we have got into the mess that we are in today. Just like people attending personal development workshops to bring to the surface the subconscious conditioning that arose from early life, we need to bring our cultural conditioning to the surface so that we can look at it in the brilliant light of day. Otherwise, we shall just CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 885 continue passing our delusions on to the next generation, never able to realize our fullest potential as divine, cosmic beings. Of course, we cannot cover everything in detail, for there simply is far too much confusion. All we can do is highlight a few features that catch the eye, especially when they question the conventional wisdom. We can begin with a short story of how the Greek classics were lost and found again. Rich- ard E. Rubenstein subtitled his book Aristotle’s Children about the way that Western Europe rediscovered the Greeks How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages. But there is no mention of Heraclitus or Parmenides in this book, the true philosophers, as lovers of wisdom, in the mystical meaning of this word. It is not surprising therefore that I had such a struggle at school to make sense of what I was being taught, as I describe in my autobiography. My teachers were merely passing on the conceptual confusion that had they had inherited from their teachers, going back many hundreds and thousands of years. Indeed, it is not easy even today to say something intelligent about a schizoid culture that is not based on Reality and the Truth. The first point to note here is that by the twelfth century the Islamic culture in Al-Andalus, mentioned on page 875, was very advanced and tolerant, far more so than the Christian civilization, which gradually over a period some seven hundred years from 790 to the fall of Gre- nada in 1492 recaptured the Iberian peninsula in the Reconquista ‘Reconquest’.547 What the Christians found in cities like Toledo and Córdoba was architecture as imaginative as Eu- rope’s was stolid, a life softened and beautified by fountains, flowers, and music, a thoroughly clean and well-ordered society living in comparative peace.548 Furthermore, this was not an exclusive society, but one in which minorities such as Jews and Greeks were equally accepted. As Rubenstein tells us, “the Reconquest resembled the ‘barbarian’ takeover of Rome centuries earlier, for the society that the conquerors acquired was far more developed than their own.”549 The story of how Europe depended upon Muslim and Jewish scholars for the recov- ery of its classical heritage is thus something of an embarrassment to those cultural chauvinists who believe in the superiority of Western culture over all other traditions.550 So how did the Greek classics arrive in Spain? Well, this is a very long story, which is still not clear in its entirety. Like so much in the evolution of the mind, it seems to have happened as much through a series of fortuitous accidents as purposive behaviour. For instance, after Aristotle died, he left his writings to Theophrastus, who succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum, who then left them to his nephew Neleus. Fearing that the manuscripts would be confiscated, Neleus hid them in a cellar, where they lay for more than two centuries. Eventu- ally they were found in a poor state of repair and found their way to Rome, where Andronicus of Rhodes (fl. 1st century BCE) repaired, copied, and classified the writings.551 The fate of the Greek classics after this seems to have been subject to the vagaries of fashion, as the Roman Empire began to break up and Christianity rose as the dominant force in 886 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Europe. For instance, Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, which was written in Latin about 410 CE and which would be a major influence on Western thinking for the next seven centuries, was powerfully shaped by Plato and the Neoplatonists, rejecting Aristotle’s worldview.552 Then about a hundred years later, Boethius (c. 480–524 or 525), concerned that fewer and fewer Romans could understand Greek, translated Aristotle’s Organon, one of the few Greek works that would be so translated around this time.553 This split between the Latin West and Greek East was to lead in 1054 to the East-West Schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Church of Byzantium, based in Constantinople, which would become the Eastern Orthodox Church.554 But a primary event that led to the works of the Greek philosophers moving east was a row in Byzantium between Nestorius (c. 386–c. 451) and Cyril (c. 378–444), Archbishops of Con- stantinople and Alexandria. This was as much a political battle as a theological one, for Cyril, an intolerant prelate, was “notorious for his love of quarrelling, his violence, and his impetu- ousness”.555 The theological argument is rather technical, but centres on the key issue of what it truly means to be a human being and our relationship to the Divine, which has troubled human beings ever since our forebears began to think many thousands of years ago, not knowing that Wholeness is the union of all opposites. In Christianity, this dilemma is called Christology, which is concerned with how the human and divine can co-exist in Jesus, as one person. It had been established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. But if so, where did Mary, his mother, fit in? This would make Mary theotokus, ‘mother of God’ or ‘God-bearer’, from Greek theo ‘god’ and tokus ‘childbirth’. But this did not make sense to Nestorius, who famously re- marked, “God is not a baby two or three months old,” which, of course, shocked those worshipping the baby Jesus. More generally, the Antiochenes, of whom Nestorius was a leader, “were inclined to use Aristotelian concepts to justify their conviction that Christ’s divine nature must not be confused with his human nature”. Thus, using Aristotle’s either-or naturalist reasoning, Nestorius argued that Jesus has two natures, one human and the other divine.556 By nature here, Nestorius meant ‘hypostasis’ from Greek upostasis ‘substance, foundation, essence, underlying reality’ from upo ‘under’ and stasis ‘a standing’. But Cyril would not have this. He said that the Logos and flesh in Jesus exist in hypostatic union.557 To say otherwise is like saying Jesus exists as two separate persons, not just two natures, which Cyril regarded as heretical. This might seem a semantic squabble, which could have been amicably resolved if Cyril had been more amenable. But he wasn’t. Alarmed by the humanistic tendencies in Antiochene theology, and as an astute politician fighting the reasonableness of Nestorius, he convened a Council at Ephesus in Asia Minor in 431, in which Nestorius was excommunicated for heresy, and sent into exile, ending his life in a monastery deep in the Egyptian desert.558 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 887 Alexandria was thus becoming a very dangerous place for independent thinkers, both Christian and pagan. As another example, a gang of Christian men had brutally stripped and murdered Hypatia in 415 in the streets of Alexandria, where she was the foremost woman mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer.559 Not surprisingly, such freethinkers fled to Mesopotamia and Persia, taking with them the works of Greek philosophy, science, and theology, which were being ignored and condemned in Byzantium. The Nestorians, who were famous linguists, translated the Greek classics first into Syriac, the lingua franca of Syria and Mesopotamia, then into Arabic, and presumably into Persian. It was thus in the Middle East that the Arabs and Persians produced their own blend of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Islamic ideas that they called falsafah, apparently a transliteration of philosophia.560 It was in this roundabout way that the works of Greek, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy found their way across North Africa into Spain, specifically Toledo, where Raymund, the Archbishop of the city from 1125 to 1152,561 supervised the translation of scripts written in Syr- iac, Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek into Latin. As Rubenstein says, Raymund of Toledo was one of the unsung heroes of Western culture, doing more than any man to make the treasures of Greek philosophy and science available to the Latin world. Indeed, for a Christian prelate, Raymund was particularly open-minded, allowing this translation work to be carried out without censorship. “God, after all, was Truth itself … and all of Spain’s three faiths agreed that God was One.”562 Although the translation centre at Toledo remained in operation until well into the thirteenth century, Palermo, the capital of the Kingdom of Sicily, which occupied not only the island but also much of southern Italy, became Europe’s premier translation centre in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.563 Sicily seems to have been a particularly suitable location for this enterprise for it was part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire from 535 to 831, when the Arabs captured it.564 Then in the 1060s to 1080s, a group of Norman adventurers captured Sicily, which became a kingdom under Roger II in 1130. Following much turmoil following Roger’s death in 1154, Frederick II of Germany, the colourful Holy Roman Emper- or, acquired Sicily in 1197 at the age of two through the machinations of his mother Con- stance, daughter of Roger from his third marriage, and her husband Henry IV.565 But the greatest translator of the Greek classics in the thirteenth century was William of Moerbeke (c. 1215–c. 1286), a Flemish Dominican, who moved to Italy in the 1260s as chap- lain and confessor to Pope Clement IV and five succeeding popes. At the direct request of Thomas Aquinas, William made literal translations of scores of Aristotelian treatises and other works directly from Greek manuscripts,566 much needed because the translations available from Spain were at worst translations of translations of translations. With the availability of Aristotle’s great corpus in particular (some three thousand pages, ranging from biology and physics to logic, psychology, ethics, and political science),567 “the 888 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY popes and scholars of the High Middle Ages tried to modernize the Church by reconciling faith and reason.”568 This was in marked contrast to the teachings of the Islamic scholars, which were kept out of the mosque, so as not to confuse and mislead the faithful.569 After all, “the ancients themselves would never think of separating ethical, religious, or philosophical knowledge from knowledge of the universe in general.”570 So with “a great yearning for wholeness and meaning in a world suddenly grown both smaller and more unfamiliar”,571 it was natural for scholars to attempt to make sense of the world we all live in. Today, we are still struggling with this great endeavour. So what can we learn from the scholastics, reinterpreting their thoughts within the brilliant light of Consciousness, grounded in Love, the Divine Essence that we all share? For as we can now see, it was the lack of an overall Cosmic Context for all our learning that led to so much confusion then, as now. The founder of the scholastic movement is generally regarded as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), who was born in the Italian Alps and who was Archbishop of Canterbury for the last sixteen years of his life.572 Anselm, not to be confused with Anselm of Laon (mid 11th century–1117), is most famous for proposing the much-criticized ontological argument for the existence of God, although he was not the first to do so; Avicenna made a similar proposal in The Book of Healing.573 In the Proslogion, Anselm reasoned that as we can conceive of an absolutely perfect being, such a being must exist in reality, even though there is no such perfection in the world we live in. One criticism of this argument is that it is circular; it uses its premise to prove itself.574 Anselm seems to begin with faith and then to use reason to prove what he believes. Indeed, much of the confusion about this issue that I have seen arises from a misconceived view of God, the Universe, and the nature of reason, the first, second, and seventh pillars of unwisdom. In Integral Relational Logic, we begin at the end and end at the beginning, in conformity with the Principle of Unity, the fundamental design principle of the Universe, as described in Part I. In this way, we begin at the Alpha point of evolution, with the Absolute Formless, from which emerges the relativistic world of form using Aristotle’s ontological concept of Being as the superclass for all other classes of concept, leading to the Omega point of evolution by forming the concept of the Absolute Whole in exactly the same way as we form all other concepts. This does not make God a scientific concept in itself. Mystical experience is necessary to confirm this line of reasoning, leading us to establish Consciousness as the overarching Context for all our lives, unifying reason and mysticism, enabling us to return Home to Paradise, whence we are conceived as both individuals and as a species. Having tentatively established the existence of God as the overall context for their inquiries, the next thing that the scholastics set out to do was resolve the contradictions between Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of universals, which lie at the heart of object-oriented modelling methods in business and thereby in IRL. The initial protagonists here seem to have been Ro- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 889 scellinus of Compiègne, ‘Roscelin’ (c. 1050–c. 1125), born in northern France, who Bertrand Russell regarded as strictly the first scholastic,575 and Guillaume of Champeaux, ‘William’ (c. 1070–1122), born near Paris.576 Roscelin refuted Plato’s theory of Forms and Ideas, asserting that the concept of apple as a universal is the result of a mental process that perceives similarities between various red, juicy objects. “The universal exists, but only as a name,” which gave rise to the scholastic philosophy of nominalism. In contrast, William maintained the traditional philosophy of Plato and Augustine that abstract concepts, like Goodness and Justice, are divine, existing independently of thought, which became scholastic realism.577 Materialistic modern philosophy takes realism to the opposite extreme. It asserts that physical objects exist independently of being perceived, in contrast to idealism, which contends that the external world is created by the mind.578 Aristotle won over from Plato in the twelfth century: we generalize from particulars. But in so doing, the philosophers changed the meaning of the word philosophy. As we saw on page 834, to Plato, a philosopher is a generalist, a man interested in every branch of learning. Aristotle, too, was a polymath, from Greek polumathes ‘knowing much’, from polu- ‘much’ and math- stem of manthanein ‘to learn’. But emphasizing particulars leads to specialization and fragmentation. So philosophy became a speciality, not grounded in Divine Wisdom, in the No Man’s Land between theology and science, in Bertrand Russell’s words.579 As we saw in Section ‘The evolution of scientific method’ in Chapter 9, ‘An Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac’ on page 686, in modern scientific method, we inductively particularize from the general, test- ing theories in experiments, which are conducted within the framework of universals. The ultimate universal is Aristotle’s ontological concept of being, which is not eternal, as Plato supposed, but the Supreme Being, as the Totality of Existence, is. As with all conflicts of opposites, we can thus resolve conflicts between the philosophical isms by recognizing that Consciousness, as a seamless, borderless continuum, is all there is. All forms, whether they be physical or nonphysical, universals or particulars, subjects or predicates, words or concepts, emerge from Consciousness, as the Datum of the Universe, through the creative power of Life, and return to the Formless through the opposite process of involution. This life, growth, decay, and death cycle applies to all beings in the relativistic world of form, as Shakyamuni Buddha discovered. And as he taught, if we do not recognize this in the depths of Immortal Being, we shall suffer. The next player to enter the scholastic game was Pierre Abélard ‘Peter Abelard’ (1079– 1142), born in Brittany. Abelard, who was very far from being a mystic, despite maybe glimps- ing the mystical with Héloïse (1101–1164), one of his brilliant students, twenty-two years younger than him, through divine lovemaking. But maybe not, for we should not confuse romantic love with this most exquisite of meditation practices, and Abelard later felt some 890 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY guilt for having seduced Heloise. As he said in his memoir ‘History of My Calamities’, “with our lessons as a pretext, we abandoned ourselves entirely to love … our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love devised something new, we welcomed it.” Sadly, however, this ecstatic relationship, expressed in some impassioned letters between them, did not win the acceptance of Heloise’s uncle and guardian Fulbert. After Heloise gave birth to a child and after she reluctantly married Abelard in secret, Fulbert sent some thugs to castrate Abe- lard, ending both his relationship and teaching career. Heloise remained in the convent, where Abelard had sent her, and Abelard, himself, entered a monastery as a priest.580 Professionally, Abelard was a student first of the nominalist Roscelin581 and then of the realist Anselm of Laon, whose lectures Abelard “found appallingly boring”,582 and who famously expelled Abelard from his school in 1113.583 Abelard then had a major confrontation with William of Champeaux, who had similarly been taught by Roscelin and Anselm of Laon, trouncing him in debate. As Rubenstein tells us, “For Abelard, it was not enough to defeat an opponent in debate; he must also humiliate the victim and make him a permanent enemy.”584 Abelard was a master of what Aristotle called ‘dialectic’, the process of confronting contradictions and overcoming them.585 Dialectic derives from the Greek dialektike, feminine singular of dialektikos ‘skilled in debate or discourse’, from dia- ‘through, across’ and legein ‘to speak’, from PIE base leg- ‘to collect’, with a host of derivatives in European languages, including logic. So Aristotle’s dialectic is cognate with Plato’s dialogue. But what do we mean by overcoming contradictions? This simplest of all questions, on page 891 of this book, lies at the heart of the human dilemma, causing much conflict and suffering over thousands of years of human learning. As we saw in Figure 3.9, ‘The Triangle of Duality’ on page 237, there are three ways in which opposites relate to each other: both-and, either-or, and neither-nor. The way that Abelard attempted to overcome contradictions is well illustrated by his book Sic et Non ‘Yes and No’. In this work, “he collected conflicting statements of the Church Fa- thers and arranged them in groups arguing for and against 158 different propositions.” For example, “That faith is to be supported by human reason, et contra.”586 The title of this book indicates that Abelard was taking a both-and approach to these contradictions, leaving them unresolved, encouraging his students to resolve them. But like a Zen koan, such contradictions cannot be resolved with an either-or mind, which Christians shared with Aristotle and indeed with Abelard, himself. So just asking such questions as whether the Jews were morally responsible for Jesus’ death or not, Abelard provoked much outrage among complacent con- servatives.587 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was particularly antagonistic to Abelard, accusing him of heresy in a series of letters written in the winter of 1139–1140, which led to a hearing in June 1140 of churchmen and high officials in the cathedral city of Sens. To Bernard, the foundation of faith was religious experience. As he famously said, “Faith believes, it does not dispute.” CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 891 But as Rubenstein points out, this was a brilliant piece of rhetorical obfuscation: “The Fathers of the Church were believers and disputants.” In the event, Abelard declined to use his great power of dialectic at the hearing, probably because his health was failing, and Bernard won by default.588 After these initial skirmishes between faith and reason, there was a long period of scholastic silence to allow Aristotle’s writings to become digested in the cultural consciousness, a hiatus that was brought to an end in the reign of Pope Innocent III at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the meantime, the search for meaning changed focus. The Roman Catholic Church had become a feudal institution, just like its secular counterparts, waging war and owning much property and land. Furthermore, despite the claim of celibacy, “bishops commonly cohabited with women, fathered children with them, and looked after their interests as their ‘nephews’.” In the search for clarity and integrity, a number of spiritual aspirants sought to become free of this hypocrisy. Foremost among these were Henry of Lausanne, known as Henry the Monk (late 11th century–1148), and Arnold of Brescia (c. 1090–1155), contemporaries of Ber- nard, who was canonized in 1174. After Abelard died, Bernard, who was associated with the rise of the Order of Cistercians, turned his attention on to those he regarded as heretics. Al- though neither Henry nor Arnold was found guilty of heresy, Henry died in prison and Ar- nold was hanged as a rebel. But the greatest spiritual challenge to the hegemony of the Catholic Church came from the Cathars in Languedoc in southern France, who called themselves Bons Hommes et Bonnes Femmes ‘Good Men and Good Women’.589 It is supposed that their name came from Greek katharos ‘pure’, also root of catharsis ‘a purification of the emotions through abreaction’. Us- ing the basic system of concept formation that we all use, described page 181 in Chapter 2, ‘Building Relationships’, they said that as there is both good and evil in the world, there must be two creative principles, or Gods, neither of which is omnipotent. The Cathars were thus out and out dualists, rejecting the materialist world, which they regarded as evil, in favour of coming into direct union with God,590 which led them to become identified as gnostics, regarded as heresy by the Catholic authorities. Accordingly, the Catholic Church mounted a crusade against the Cathars, seeking to ex- terminate them. On 22nd July 1209, the town of Béziers was besieged,591 with Catholics and Cathars alike seeking refuge in the churches. But this did not avert a massacre. “All inside were slaughtered wholesale, women, invalids, babies, and priests.” Afterwards, Arnaud Amal- ric, the papal legate, proudly wrote to Innocent III, “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”592 So much for Jesus’ admo- nition, “Love your neighbours as yourself.” 892 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY At about the same time, two other teachers, similarly influenced by Aristotle, were condemned as heretics for exactly the opposite reason. David of Dinant (c. 1160–c. 1217) was impressed by Aristotle’s sense of unity, reasoning that the material universe, far from being evil was good, indeed it was God. David thought that matter, soul, and God are One, sharing a common underlying feature, which is Existence itself. But if there is no separation between God and humanity, why should humans need salvation or the forgiveness of sins?593 This pantheistic perspective, being all-inclusive, was thus anathema to the Church authorities, who condemned David’s writings at two councils in 1210 and 1215.594 Amaury de Bène ‘Amalric of Bena’ (died c. 1204-1207) was another pantheist condemned at these two councils. It seems that Almaric and his followers, called Amalricians, believed that a new age would shortly emerge. This vision was influenced by Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135– 1202), a utopian mystic, founder of a millennial group called Joachimites.595 Joachim had announced that a Third Age was imminent called ‘the age of the Spirit’, when people would be saved by God’s grace alone, following the age of the Father (the Old Testament) and the age of the Son (the New Testament). This was not good news for the Roman Catholic Church, as Rubenstein observes, “since that eventuality would make organized religion unnecessary.” Several Amalricians were later burnt at the stake or condemned to life imprisonment for claiming that Christians were sinless, that the notion of original sin is a lie.596 Almaric, himself, was exhumed, his remains were burned and scattered in unconsecrated ground.597 Even today, 800 years later, the Roman Catholic Church feels threatened by the prospect of an awakened society living in union with the Divine, for as recently as 3rd February 2003, the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue wrote a long pamphlet condemning the New Age movement.598 As David and Almaric had drawn on Aristotle’s writings, these two were condemned at the councils of 1210 and 1215. However, the tide was beginning to turn, as the result of the emergence of three new institutions. The first was the university, which has guided the evolution of the mind from the eleventh century to this day, derived from universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning ‘community of teachers and scholars’.599 Ostensibly, universities are interested in Wholeness, for university, like universe, literally means ‘turned into one undivided whole’, from the Latin universus ‘whole, entire’ from unus ‘one’ and versus past participle of vertere ‘to turn’. Sadly, however, universities do not live up to their name, being highly fragmented into a multitude of specialist fields, often with high hedges separating them. Although there were centres of learning in India and Arabia during the Middle Ages, the first European university was founded in Bologna in 1088. This was followed by the Univer- sity of Paris, later associated with the Sorbonne, founded around 1150.600 The University of Oxford was the first university in the English-speaking world, but whose foundation date is CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 893 uncertain. The expulsion of foreigners from the University of Paris in 1167 caused many Eng- lish scholars to return from France and settle in Oxford. But it was not until 1231 that the masters were recognised as a universitas or corporation.601 The University of Cambridge began to be formed in 1209 when some scholars left Oxford after the town authorities hanged two scholars for the murder or manslaughter of a woman,602 an early example of what became known as the tension between town and gown. These early universities were corporations of students and masters, and they eventually received their charters from popes, emperors, and kings. Nevertheless, they were free to govern themselves, provided they taught neither atheism nor heresy, in other words, the Truth. Until the end of the eighteenth century, most universities offered a core curriculum based on the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the Trivium), and geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (the Quadrivium). Students then proceeded to study under one of the professional faculties of medicine, law, and theology.603 Following the rediscovery of the Greek classics, it was Plato’s Academy that had inspired the foundation of these centres of learning, although it was not until the late 1580s that the word academic was used in English as both an adjective and noun.604 Similarly, the King in the opening speech of Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ said, “Our Court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in living art.”605 Poetic Academe led to academia in the second half of the twentieth century, used prosaically to denote the academic world in contrast to business.606 The word academic can also be used disparagingly by spiritual seekers who need neither reason nor revelation to know the Truth, to know that Love is the Divine Essence that we all share. Indeed, by placing more emphasis on the intellect than on self-reflective, Divine Intel- ligence, the universities are one of the principal institutions inhibiting the awakening of society. For nearly a thousand years, they have been conservatively protecting the status quo, under the sway successively of the Catholic Church, the scientific establishment, and business corporations, which are the probably the primary funders of research today. To be successful in a university, it is necessary to learn how and what the professors, fellows, and lecturers want you to learn. A new renaissance, starting afresh at the very beginning, as we need in the opening chapter of this book, is not generally acceptable. Yet it is absolutely to demolish the seven pillars of unwisdom on which Western civilization is based in order to rebuild both academia and business on the seven pillars of wisdom. The other two institutions that influenced the acceptance of Aristotle’s writings were the Order of the Friars Preachers, popularly known as the Dominicans, founded by Dominic de Guzmán (1170–1221), born in northern Spain, and the Order of Friars Minor, more commonly known as the Franciscans, founded by Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226). This might seem surprising, but if the Catholics wished to defeat heretics skilled in using Aristotle’s reasoning 894 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY in debate, they had better use preachers skilled in Aristotelian dialectics.607 Foremost among these scholastic friars were Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280), Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), and Eckhart von Hochheim ‘Meister Eckhart’ (c. 1260–c. 1328), who were Dominicans, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217–1274), Roger Bacon (c. 1220– 1292), John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), and William of Ockham (c. 1288–c. 1348), who were Franciscans. The most prominent Aristotelian during the thirteenth century was Siger of Bra- bant (c. 1240–1284), who Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) placed in paradise as one of twelve sages,608 and who had many disputes at the university of Paris with Aquinas and Bonaventure, as the leaders of the Dominicans and Franciscans, respectively. In this draft of this chapter, we only have the energy to make a couple of observations. It is not necessary to dive into these murky waters any further. Aquinas, who is regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as a model teacher for those studying for the priesthood,609 is famous for developing five proofs for the existence of God, influenced by Aristotle’s notion of the Unmoved Mover, given in the Summa Theologiæ: 1. Anything that changes must be changed by something else. If we are to avoid infinite regress, we must stop somewhere at a first cause of change, which is not changed by anything. 2. Looking at the chain of cause and effect, nothing can cause itself, for to do so, it would need to exist prior to itself. Now we cannot eliminate a cause, because to do so would eliminate its effects. Again, to avoid infinite regress, as we observe effects, there must be a first cause. 3. Regarding necessity, some things need not be, for they spring up and die away. But everything cannot be like this. Some things must be, owing their necessity to some other necessary being. Once again, to avoid infinite regress, there must be a necessary being whose existence owes nothing to anything outside itself. 4. Looking at the degrees of qualities, some things are better, truer, and more excellent than others. Now according to Aristotle, when things possess some property in common, such as hotness, the one most fully possessing it causes it in the others. There must therefore be a most perfect being that causes in all other beings whatever goodness or perfection that they might have. 5. Teleologically, we observe goal-directed behaviour in all bodies obeying natural laws. But goals are not reached by accident; someone directs them with awareness and understanding, such as an archer shooting an arrow. There must therefore be someone with inner understanding directing all of nature to its goal, and this we can call God.610 Thomas began writing his comprehensive theology for his students in 1265 and it was still unfinished when he died nine years later.611 His theory of causality caused quite a stir at his CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 895 time and is still unresolved, three quarters of a millennium later. Even today, we are managing our business affairs with little understanding of the evolutionary energies that cause us to behave as we do. In a sense, we have never left the Dark Ages. As Rubenstein delightfully expresses it, “A master at the University of Paris presenting Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover as the true God would find himself not only out of a job but very likely serving as fuel for one of the Inquisition’s bonfires.”612 Provoked very much by Stiger’s distinction between Aristote- lian scientia and Christian faith, Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, issued two Condemna- tions in 1270 and 1277 of certain Aristotelian doctrines, thirteen the first time, increased to 219 seven years later.613 Then in fourteenth century, William of Ockham insisted that Aquinas had erred in trying to formulate a ‘natural theology’ and that science and religion would be better off if they separated.614 William is most famous for Ockham’s razor: “conceptual entities ought not to be multiplied unnecessarily.” Ockham’s razor implies that the attempt to construct a unitary system capable of explaining both natural and divine beings is impossible.615 Despite the best endeavours of the great scholastics to find a both-and solution to the conflict between faith and reason, science became increasingly alienated from religion,616 which, with neither side willing to give way, has led to the great psychospiritual, ecological, and economic crisis that we are wrestling with today.

The Humanist Renaissance With the Aristotelians and Christians unable to reconcile their differences about the relationship of the Divine to Nature and the Universe, in the Renaissance that followed the Middle Ages, the focus of attention turned to the third element in this triangle: humanity. Renais- sance, a term coined by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) in 1550,617 derives from French renaître, from Vulgar Latin *renascere, from Latin renasci ‘to be born again’. But this rebirth was only relative, unlike the spiritual renaissance taking place today, which is returning to our Divine Source, from which everything is ultimately born. Of course, this was not possible in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries for the Christian Churches were based on fear, not Love, preventing their members from knowing the Truth. The Renaissance was a complex cultural movement denoting the revival of classical antiquity, particularly in the arts and sciences. As such, it was especially focused on human creativity, on the growth of structure, on the outward, evolutionary movement from the Formless to form, leading to the intellectual movement called humanism, whose history is another very confused story. To truly know what it means to be a human being, we need to follow the maxim “Know thyself,” which Thales of Miletus is credited with creating.618 But to do this, we need to answer the time-honoured question, “Who am I?” which leads us to the Divine if we follow the 896 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY teachings of such mystics as Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950). But humanism today is generally regarded as atheistic, defined by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as “a rationalistic system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.” The same source defines Renaissance humanism as “a cultural movement which turned away from medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman thought.” In the universities, this focus on the classical humanities has given rise to the secular degree of Literæ Humaniores ‘more humane letters’, colloquially called the ‘Greats’ at the Uni- versity of Oxford, the study of Greek and Roman classical literature, philosophy, and ancient history.619 The overall effect of these secular, humanist developments is that Western civilization has become ever more superficial and specialized, egoically focusing attention on how we human beings might exert mastery over Nature, over the materialistic universe. So for the most part, we have lost touch with depth and breadth, the mystical foundation of our nature and with abstract thought, which for Plato was the essence of being a philosopher. Indeed, while nature in 1300 meant the essential qualities of being, as early as 1250, the word was being used to denote a person’s physical powers, leading in 1662 to nature being used to mean ‘the material world’.620 It is utterly amazing how far we have moved away from Reality over the years; we have made what is secondary primary, calling primary Nature ‘supernatural’, supposedly a power that violates natural forces. During the humanist Renaissance, our forebears were still in an intermediate stage of this inversion process, sometimes still standing firmly on their feet, but increasingly standing on their heads. Francesco Petrarca ‘Petrarch’ (1304–1374) is popularly regarded as the father of humanism. Petrarch is particularly noted for his sonnets, poems of fourteen lines with a very well-defined structure, from Italian sonnetto ‘little song’, from Latin sonus ‘sound’. “The Italian sonnet, which had various rhyming schemes, included two parts. First, the octave (two quatrains), which describe a problem, followed by a sestet (two tercets), which gives the resolution to it. Typically, the ninth line creates a ‘turn’ or volta which signals the move from proposition to resolution.”621 The English sonnet generally consists of three quatrains ending with a couplet with the rhyming pattern a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g, each line consisting of ten syllables in iambic pentameter form. Here is William Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 897 By chance or nature's changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Even though this poem contains much structure, as does a computer program, it is nevertheless a love poem of great beauty, conveying a profound message of humanity’s relationship to the Divine and the Universe, with both inner and outer meanings. For instance, the poem progresses from mundane periods of time—day, May, and summer—to the eternal,622 by implication making no separation between the man and Divinity, contrary to the theological teachings of the time. But we should not be surprised by this for both poems and programs are products of the creative power of Life arising directly from our Divine Source. Despite the efforts of computer scientists to write programs that can write poems and other programs, these mechanical programs of research into artificial intelligence cannot succeed because they are not in contact with the Source, and neither are the scientists who believe that they can create such programs. Another word we associate with the Renaissance is aesthetics ‘the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty’, from Greek aisthetikos ‘of sense perception’, from aistheta ‘perceptible material things’, from aisthanesthai ‘to perceive, feel’, from PIE base *au- ‘to perceive’, also root of audible, etc., in contrast to noeta ‘things thinkable or immaterial’. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) originally defined the word in German to mean ‘the study or critique of taste’ in Æsthetica (1750–1758), although the word was being used in 1732 in English to mean ‘the philosophical theory of the beautiful’.623 We are now in another great muddle, which arises from the separation of opposites by the either-or mind, a long way from Lao Tzu’s both-and affirmation that we cannot see beauty unless we also see ugliness. The primary, inner, immaterial world is the true Source of Beauty, even more beautiful than the outer, especially when grounded in Nonduality and Wholeness, beyond the subjective and objective. Furthermore, the word sense, which derives from Latin sensus ‘faculty of feeling, thought, meaning’, from sentire ‘to feel’, has come to have a primary meaning ‘a faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch’. Furthermore, words like sensual and sensuous have both come to mean ‘gratifying the senses’, especially in a sexual sense, forgetting that such pleasurable feelings arise as much from the entire being from body to spirit, especially in divine lovemaking, when the egoic mind is absent. So the deeper we go into being, the more 898 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY we appreciate beauty. Sadly, we have become so separated from Reality, there simply are no words in which to convey the exquisite sense of Wholeness I enjoy today. How humans represent our external visual world went through a profound change during the Renaissance, particularly in relationship to perspective, “method of graphically depicting three-dimensional objects and spatial relationships on a two-dimensional plane”. It is this field that mathematics and art served each other, as Morris Kline tells us. “During the Middle Ages painting, serving somewhat as the handmaiden of the Church, concentrated on embel- lishing the thoughts and doctrines of Christianity.”624 As a consequence, art tended to be conceptual, depicting objects and surroundings independently of one another, like in Egyptian and Cretan paintings and drawings, which would show the head and legs of a figure in profile, while the eye and torso were shown frontally,625 the size of the figures being ordered in relationship to their importance in the po- litico-religious hierarchy.626 For instance, 11.32: Limestone Figure 11.32 shows a limestone ostracon (inscribed potsherd) with a drawing of a cat bringing a boy before a mouse magistrate, from the New Kingdom Egypt of the 20th dynasty (1200–1085 BC). “This system produces not the illusion of depth but the sense that objects and their surroundings have been compressed within a shallow space behind the picture plane.”627 In the Middle Ages, early Christian artists made no attempt to depict figures in optical perspective, which Greek and Roman painters endeavoured to do. They were more concerned with illustrating religious themes and inducing religious feelings than representing people in the actual and present world.628 For instance, Figure 11.33 is a Byzantine mosaic from 547 of Teodo- ra, the wife of Emperor Justinian I, and her retinue, on the north wall of the apse in the Basilica of San Vitale, Figure 11.33: Byzantine mozaic Ravenna, Italy.629 In the early Renaissance, artists like Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255–c. 1319) and Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337), considered the father of modern painting, made some initial attempts at painting with an optical perspective. For instance, Figure 11.34 is Duccio’s painting of the Last Supper in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy.630 Here, the receding walls and ceiling lines, somewhat foreshortened, suggest depth. But the table appears CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 899 to be higher in the back than in the front and the objects on the table do not appear to be lying on it.631 What was needed for artists to paint with full perspective was a mathematical theory. The foundations of such a science of painting were laid down by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), an Italian architect and engineer, who had worked out a system of perspective by 1425.632 Morris Kline illustrates the basic principles of the focused system of perspective with a sketch of a hallway, reproduced in Figure 11.35.633 The figure shows a hallway viewed by a person whose eye is at point O (not shown), which lies on a line perpendicular to the page and through the point P, which is known Figure 11.34: Beginning of perspective as the vanishing point. All lines that are perpendicular to the plane of the canvas meet at P, such as AA', EE', and DD'. Also parallel lines that are at an angle to the canvas also meet at a point. For instance, lines parallel to EK and FL, at 45° and 135° to the canvas, meet at D1 and D2, respectively, called diagonal vanishing points. The line D1PD2 is the horizon line. The squares on the floor of the hallway illustrate the principle of foreshortening. The ratio of the sides of nearest ‘row’ of squares is approximately 100:64, reduced to about 100:39 in the ‘row’ furthest away. The ‘heights’ of the squares of the con- verging parallels diminish faster than the widths of the parallels that remain parallels in the drawing. I trust that this makes sense. The actual formula uses some tedious trigonometry.634 Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) produced many excellent examples of perfect perspective with his mathematical and aesthetic genius, making numerous detailed studies for each painting.635 Figure 11.37 is a restored copy of the ‘Last Supper’, a somewhat faded mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The vanishing point for the perpendicular parallels in the walls and ceiling is the top of Jesus’ head, focusing attention on him. The painting is much more realistic than that of Duccio, leading viewers to feel that they are actually in the room. Da Vinci also brought the ancient Greek and Roman technique of chiaroscuro to its full potential in such works as the ‘Adoration of the Magi’. Chiaroscuro, Italian for ‘light-dark’, from chiaro ‘light’ and scuro ‘dark’, is a technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects, a clear example of the ubiquitous Prin- ciple of Unity in the arts. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was another who made extensive use of chiaroscuro, for instance in his painting of ‘The Deposition of Christ’ in the Vatican Museum.636 Another example is ‘La Fornarina’ by Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), not only showing the contrast between the well-lit model and the very dark background of 900 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY

D C

D' C'

D2 P D1

A' E' B'

K L

A EF B Figure 11.35: The mathematical basis of artistic perspective foliage, but also the delicate shadowing on the model’s left shoulder and arm (Fig- ure 11.36).637 The Renaissance artists thought that they were repro- ducing nature in their paintings with their blend of mathematics and aestheticism. They thus have a similarity with scientists developing mathematical models of the physical universe. But, of course, they weren’t depicting the essence of Nature. As the mystics of the East discovered, the entire world of form, both our external world and representations of this world, is just an appearance in Consciousness, maya in the East. Furthermore, such pictures do not help us to intelligently manage our business affairs with full consciousness of the evolutionary forces that cause us to behave as we do. To do this, we need a coherent conceptual model, with the emphasis on mental pictures and their meaningful relationships to each other, describing the psychodynamics of society as a whole. Like conceptual art, these pictures are not necessarily beautiful, but they 11.36: Example of chiaroscuro are utilitarian. In particular, the Principle of Unity is all- powerful in its elegant simplicity. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 901

Figure 11.37: The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, depicting full artistic perspective Another great surge in the growth of structure began during the Renaissance in the field of music. During the Middle Ages, the predominant form of vocal music was plainchant, also called plainsong, from Latin planus ‘even, level, flat’ and Latin cantare, frequentative of canere ‘to sing’, cognate with Greek kanássein ‘to flow with a gurgling sound’, from PIE-base *kan- ‘to sing’, also root of hen, accent, and incentive. As the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music tells us, plainchant was “The official monophonic unison chant, originally unaccompanied, of the Christian liturgies,” such as the Ambrosian and Gregorian chants, which survive in manuscripts from the 11th to 13th centuries. “The origins of Christian liturgical chant lie in Jewish synagogue practice and in early pagan music at early church centres in Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, and Constantinople.”638 Monophony, from Greek monos ‘single’ and phone ‘sound’, is music for a single voice or part, distinct from polyphony ‘many-sounding’, from Greek polus ‘many’, music in two or more independent voices, where a voice can be instrumental or vocal. During the Middle Ages, Gregorian chants, named after Gregory I, pope from 590 to 604, were based on four modes, called authentic, plus four others called plagal, from Greek plagios ‘oblique’, having a range from the fourth below to the fifth above its final tone. These church modes, listed in the first eight rows of Table 11.15, were named after seven Greek octave species, but somewhat differently because the Greek scales were named in descending rather than ascending order.639 They were all diatonic, meaning that the octave was divided into five tones (T) and two semitones (S).640 902 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY However, there was a problem with the Lydian mode because the interval between F and B is a tritone, alternatively named augmented fourth or diminished fifth, called ‘diabolus in musica’ in the Renaissance because of its instability.641 So there was a tendency to change B to B♭, without acknowledging that a change in mode was being made as a consequence.642 No. Mode Scale Intervals Pattern 1. Dorian D e f g a b c d T S T T T S T D 2. Hypodorian a b c D e f g a T S T T S T T A 3. Phrygian E f g a b c d e S T T T S T T E 4. Hypophrygian b c d E f g a b S T T S T T T B 5. Lydian F g a b c d e f T T T S T T S F 6. Hypolydian c d e F g a b c T T S T T T S C 7. Mixolydian G a b c d e f g T T S T T S T G 8. Hypomixolydian d e f G a b c d T S T T S T T D 9. Aeolian (minor) A b c d e f g a T S T T S T T A 10. Hypoaeolian e f g A b c d e S T T T S T T E 11. Ionian (major) C d e f g a b c T T S T T T S C 12. Hypoionian g a b C d e f g T T S T T S T G Table 11.15: Eight Gregorian church modes plus four additions In 1547, a Swiss music theorist Heinrich Glarean (1488-1563) resolved this deception in a book called Dodecachordon from Greek dōdeka ‘twelve’ and khordē ‘string’, cognate with cord and chord in geometry rather than chord in music, which derives from Middle English cord, shortened form of accord ‘agreement’, from Medieval Latin accordāre ‘to bring into agreement, be of one heart’, from Latin ad- and cor, cord- ‘heart’, cognate with cordial etc. Glarean introduced two more authentic modes, called Aeolian and Ionian, with their corresponding plagal modes. With the rise of polyphony, the plagal modes became more and more irrele- vant. And with an infiltration of folk music into the ecclesiastical and secular art forms, these new modes paved the way for modern major and minor scales.643 The rise of polyphony during the Renaissance gave rise to another major challenge: how to maintain consonance in all possible keys. The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music defines consonance as “Acoustically, the sympathetic vibration of sound waves of different frequen- cies related as the ratios of small whole numbers; psychologically, the harmonious sounding together of two or more notes.”644 However, what is consonant is somewhat subjective and what ratios are to be used? If polyphonic music is to be composed in all twelve major and minor keys and sound harmonious in each of them, instruments really need to be capable of equal temperament, a tuning system CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 903 based on the division of the octave into twelve equal semitones. This means that the ratios between successive semitones must be the same, leading to a geometric progression, not an arithmetical one. Specifically, as an octave is double the frequency of the tonic, then each semitone ratio is 12 2 in equal temperament, a ratio of 1.059463094 to 1, very far from the ratio of two small integers. To resolve this difficulty, music theorists today further divide a semitone into a hundred parts, each cent having a ratio of 1.00057779 to 1. However, to simplify calculations and understanding, a logarithmic scale is used, converting Nature’s geometric series into more a familiar arithmetical one. The number of cents between two notes of frequency x and y is thus given by this formula: n = 1200log ()-x- 2 y Two notes differing by a cent is an extremely small interval, not perceptible to the human ear when played successively and barely noticeable even when together, as Wikipedia demonstrates. The threshold of what is perceptible is about five to six cents, although this can obviously vary from person to person and with the purity, tonality, or timbre of the notes being compared.645 Apart from the octave, the interval that is generally considered to be the most consonant is the perfect fifth, with a ratio of 3:2, as Pythagoras discovered, differing from 500 cents by less than two. Similarly, the perfect fourth, with a ratio of 4:3, differs from equal temperament by just two cents. Indeed, the ancients sought harmony in only the ratios 1:2:3:4646 or powers of these numbers, as the column marked ‘Pythagorean tuning’ in Table 11.16 indicates.647 Each ratio is of the form 3m/2n, where m and n are both either positive or negative integers. However, at the end of the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler, seeking a unifying harmony in music, geometry, and the heavens, considered the ratios 6:5, 5:4, 8:5, 5:3 to be consonant.648 These ratios are a part of what is called ‘just intonation’, listed in Table 11.16,649 “a manner of tuning in performance so that intervals are tuned so pure that they do not beat. String players normally try to play in this manner (when they are not accompanied by a keyboard [tuned to equal temperament],” for the strings in the violin family are tuned at intervals of perfect fifths.650 To complete the picture, the final three columns in Table 11.16 list the first 32 terms of the harmonic series and their nearest intervals in the 12-tone octave.651 Of course, the different harmonics of the various instruments greatly enhance the pleasure of listening to music, even though some of these ratios might appear more dissonant than consonant. With these few holistic reflections on music, answering some questions that I had as a teenager, we can return to the evolution of the mind, as expressed through music. The poly- 904 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Equal Pythagorean Just Harmonic series Interval Note Temp. tuning intonation Cents Ratio Diff. Ratio Diff. No. Ratio Diff. Tonic C 0 1/1 0 1/1 0 0 1/1 0 Minor second C♯, D♭ 100 256/243 -10 16/15 12 17 17/16 5 9/8 4 Major second D 200 9/8 4 9, 18 9/8 4 10/9 -18 Minor third D♯, E♭ 300 32/27 -6 6/5 16 19 19/16 -2 Major third E 400 81/64 8 5/4 -14 5, 10, 20 5/4 -14 Perfect fourth F 500 4/3 -2 4/3 -2 21 21/16 -29 11, 22 11/8 -49 Tritone F♯, G♭ 600 1024/729 -12 7/5 -17 23 23/16 28 Perfect fifth G 700 3/2 2 3/2 2 3, 6, 12, 24 3/2 2 25 25/16 -27 Minor sixth G♯, A♭ 800 128/81 -8 8/5 14 13, 26 13/8 41 Major sixth A 900 27/16 6 5/3 -16 27 27/16 6 7, 14, 21, 28 7/4 -31 Minor seventh A♯, B♭ 1000 16/9 -4 7/4 -31 29 29/16 30 15, 30 15/8 -12 Major seventh B 1100 243/128 10 15/8 -12 31 31/16 45 Octave C 1200 2/1 0 2/1 0 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 2/1 0 Table 11.16: Differences in interval ratios with 12-tone scale in equal temperament in cents phonic era began in the late Middle Ages with the late Renaissance being regarded as the ‘golden age of polyphony’, with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) being its most prominent exponent, writing many masses, motets, and other sacred works. Palestrina probably wrote no purely instrumental music.652 During the following Baroque epoch of music (from about 1600 to 1750), polyphony came to be called counterpoint, from Latin contrapunctum, cantus contrapunctus, literally ‘song or music pointed-against’. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and George Frider- ic Handel (1685–1759) marked the highpoint of contrapuntal writing.653 Bach was particularly adept at writing fugues, from Latin fuga ‘flight’, related to fugere ‘to flee’, root of fugitive, in which a theme or themes is extended and developed mainly by imitative counterpoint. Bach’s two books of twenty-four preludes and fugues in each of the twelve major and minor keys, collectively called Das Wohltemperirte Clavier ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, published in 1722 and 1744, are generally regarded as two of the most influential works in the history of western classical music.654 And Bach’s unfinished The Art of Fugue, consisting of eighteen complex fugues and canons based on a simple theme, with strong mathematical associa- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 905 tions,655 is a magnum opus of thematic transformation and contrapuntal devices, often cited as the summation of polyphonic techniques.656 With music in the Middle Ages being primarily sacred and vocal, the Renaissance saw the beginnings of a number of bifurcations, that were to be fully developed in the succeeding Ba- roque, Classical, and Romantic periods. These include sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, and staged and not staged, giving rise to the major musical structures we know today: symphonies, concertos, operas, oratorios, ballets, and a multitude of smaller groupings, such as string quartets and piano sonatas, sonata from Latin sonare ‘to sound’, the word being used from the late sixteenth century to mean an instrumental piece, in contrast to a cantata ‘something sung’, cognate with chant as above. The first of these structures to emerge was the opera, ‘work’ in Italian, plural of Latin opus ‘work’. Operas evolved from such humanistic Renaissance musical forms as polyphonic mad- rigals and the intermedio, a theatrical performance with music performed in the intervals between the acts of plays in some Italian courts. Operas were an attempt to revive the classical Greek drama, typical of the Renaissance. The first major opera still performed today was L’Ofeo by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), first staged in 1607.657 While operas tend to deal with history and mythology, the plot of an oratorio is generally more sacred in character, and thus more suited to performance in churches than on the stage, without costumes, scenery, or dramatic action. Oratorio derives from Latin oratorium ‘place of prayer’, from orare ‘to speak, pray’. One of the earliest oratorios was ‘Juditha Triumphans’ by Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), first performed in 1716.658 But, of course, we mostly associate the oratorio with Handel, who wrote over thirty of them, the best known being Messiah from 1741. While vocal music predominated during the Renaissance, Archangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was the first composer to derive his fame exclusively from instrumental music.659 He is particularly noted for his twelve concerti grossi, ‘big concertos’ which were to have a strong influence on his successors, such as Vivaldi.660 The word concerto is Old Italian for ‘agreement, harmony’, possibly from Vulgar Latin *concertāre ‘to settle by argument’, frequentative of conserěre ‘to join or fit together, connect’, from Latin concertare ‘to strive eagerly, contend zealously, debate’, although the semantic and phonetic changes lead to some doubt about this etymology.661 However, such an etymology does make sense. It illustrates the convergent powers of evolution for concertare derives from cum ‘together with’ and certare ‘to contend’, frequentative of cernere ‘to separate’ from PIE base *krei ‘sieve, discriminate, distinguish’. A concerto grosso is a type of concerto in which a small group of instruments (‘concerti- no’) is contrasted with the main body (‘ripiendo’).662 During the Baroque era, the concerto grosso evolved into the concerto for solo instrument, such as those by Vivaldi and Bach, with the ripiendo evolving into the symphony in the classical period with Joseph Haydn (1732– 1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) showing the way. Symphony is another 906 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY word indicating that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts, for it means ‘harmony’, deriving from Greek sun ‘together’ and phone ‘sound’. Another factor leading to the emergence of the symphony was the rapid development of musical instruments from the Renaissance onwards, leading to the symphony orchestra we know today. Although orchestrate figuratively means ‘to combine harmoniously, like instruments in an orchestra’, in the ancient Greek theatre, an orchestra was a large semicircular space in front of the stage, where the chorus danced and sang.663 Since the early days of human evolution, people have discovered that sound waves of various pitches can be produced through vibrations, either of air in pipes (organs and horns) or of solid objects, like strings under tension (violins and pianos), tightened membranes (drums), or objects of wood or metal in themselves (xylophones). Implicitly using Integral Relational Logic, the ancient Greeks used these characteristics of sound production as defining attributes for all instruments, which the divided into wind, strings, and percussion. Then in 1914, perhaps influenced by an ancient India system of classification, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs published an extensive new scheme for classifying the instruments in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. They used four main classes as indicated in Table 11.17.664 Class Etymology Examples What vibrates idiophones Latin idem ‘same’ xylophone itself membranophones Latin membrāna ‘skin’ drum, kazoo membrane chordophones Greek chorde ‘gut, string’ piano or cello strings aerophones Latin āēr ‘air’ pipe organ, oboe column of air Table 11.17: Class of musical instruments They then went on to subdivide these classes into a hierarchical structure using the Dewey decimal system for classifying books. For example, a bugle is numbered 423.121.22, the 3, for instance, indicating that the player’s lips cause the air to vibrate directly, in contrast to an instrument with a reed, like a clarinet, or an edge-blown instrument, like a flute.665 Another defining attribute for classifying instruments is range of pitch, such as soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass. While there were examples of all these types of instruments in ancient times, in the middle of the second millennium, they went through a rapid process of development. For instance, while the invention of the pipe organ is credited to Ctesibius, an Alexandrian engineer in the 3rd century BCE, the tenth century monastic revival contributed to organs entering the West- ern church, where they were to play a central role.666 Other keyboard instruments were developed during the Renaissance, such as the virginals and harpsichord, where the sound is produced by an ingenious mechanism for plucking strings,667 and the clavichord, invented in the early fourteenth century, the sound being produced by striking a string with a tangent, CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 907 which not only initiates the sound but also determines its pitch by setting the length of the vibrating string. These technological developments led to the invention of the modern piano in 1698 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Piano is an abbreviation of fortepiano or pianoforte ‘soft-loud’, from the piano’s ability to produce notes according to touch, producing a vast expressive range. The sounds are produced by felt-covered hammers striking strings, immediately rebounding, unlike tangents in the clavichord, which must remain in contact with the string to set the pitch. The piano is extremely popular today due to its ability to sound ten or more notes at once, thus giving an approximate rendering of any piece of Western music.668 The instruments in the modern symphony orchestra similarly evolved from Renaissance instruments. For example, the oboe, a double-reed woodwind instrument, originated about 1660,669 evolving from the shawm made in Europe from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth century.670 And the violin family of instruments—violin, viola, cello, and double bass— evolved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the rebec, a fiddle played under the chin, and the viol family, usually held vertically on the lap or between the legs for larger instruments, called ‘viola da gamba’, literally ‘leg-viol’. The violin’s form and technique were standardized by 1800, with no significant developments being made since then.671 As with so many other technological developments, the evolution of musical instruments has thus followed the classic S-shape of the growth curve, today reaching the top of the curve, with no further possibilities for development. Even though Curt Sachs added electrophones to the Hornbostel-Sachs system of classifying musical instruments in 1940—those that produce sounds by electronic means—there is every indication that we have reached the saturation point of this particular learning curve, yet another indication of the limits of technology. As this book is endeavouring to show over and over again, we human beings are the leading edge of evolution, not our machines, tools, and instruments. It is thus a fundamental misconception to believe that technological development can drive economic growth indefinitely, which we look at again in the final two chapters of this book. Finally in this section, the Renaissance saw two other inventions introduced into Europe that not only demonstrates the way that the mind has evolved over the years, but which sig- nificantly influenced the rate of the evolution of the mind: paper and the printing press. These were two of what Joseph Needham called the ‘four great inventions of ancient China’, the others being the compass and gunpowder.672 It is believed that true paper, from Greek papūros ‘papyrus’, originated in China in the second century CE, its use spreading into Europe via the Islamic world in the early twelfth century.673 Woodblock printing, originally a method of printing text, images, and patterns on cloth, began in China in the early third century CE, arriving in Europe about a thousand years later.674 908 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY The first printing press appeared in China about 600, with the first newspaper being produced about a century later. But a third invention was needed to print books in Latin characters: that of movable type cast from metal matrices. Although metal movable type was invented in Korea in the thirteenth century,675 Johann Gensfliesch zum Gutenberg is generally credited as the independent inventor of what was called ‘artificial script’ in Europe in the 1440s. Johannes Gutenberg was a German goldsmith, who conducted his epoch-making experiments in Mainz between 1444 and 1448, perfecting his invention far enough by 1450 to exploit it commercially.676 Typefaces came to be called fonts or founts, from the French fond- er ‘to melt’, from Latin fundere ‘to pour forth’, presumably from the way that hot metal was poured into character moulds. The rest, as they say, is history. But not quite. In 1982, John Warnock and Charles Gesch- ke founded Adobe systems to develop PostScript, a programming language that could be used as a highly versatile page description language. This language, incorporated in the Apple La- serWriter in 1985, together with the Macintosh computer, sparked the desktop publishing revolution, just as explosive as the invention of the printing press.677 The PostScript language introduced a powerful mathematical way of defining almost any shaped curve called Bézier curves,678 a special case of Bézier surfaces, which the French engineer Pierre Bézier used in three dimensions to design automobile bodies in 1962.679 This rev- olutionized the way that fonts could be produced, leading to the amazing variety we see on our computers today. Because fonts are mathematically defined, they can be scaled, fitted around curves, and manipulated in almost any other way imaginable. Together with Uni- code, a universal character set of over one million positions, any sign or character in any language can be defined with Bézier curves, displayed in web browsers and printed in books at the touch of a button or two. But once again, we are watching this technology approach the saturation point of the growth curve. The changes being made today are in the details, not in the semantic and mathematical infrastructure, which is now well established. Still driven by the relentless pursuit of economic growth, companies like Adobe and Microsoft continue to produce new versions of their products, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Word. But how much longer can this continue?

The Reformation In the sixteenth century, Christianity also began to fragment as the result of the Reformation. Martin Luther (1483–1546) did not intend to start the Protestant Revolution when he pinned Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiaru—commonly known as the ‘Ninety-five The- ses’—on the north door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany on 31st October 1517.680 But this is what happened. Luther was born in Eisleben, his father being a businessman on CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 909 the rise and wanting his son to become a lawyer, thereby increasing the prosperity of the family. However, six weeks after completing his basic education, Luther, deeply afraid of death during a violent thunderstorm, vowed to become a monk, this being what he thought to be the surest way to avoid hell.681 Accordingly, at the age of twenty-one, Luther left the University of Erfurt and entered the Augustinian priory in that city, the most rigorous of seven major monasteries there. As he later recalled, “if any monk ever got to heaven by his scrupulous observance of monastic discipline, he would be that monk.” However, his superior Johann von Staupitz, worried about his mental stability, recommended that he study theology as an antidote to morbid introspec- tion. As the result, in 1512, in his late twenties, Luther took up a lectureship in biblical studies at the University of Wittenberg, where he looked deeply into what the Bible and Augustine of Hippo said about salvation, eschewing the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and the pagan Aristotle.682 It was the custom at the university for the teachers to debate theological propositions as an academic exercise. This is what Luther intended when he pinned what must have been a large piece of paper on the church door.683 What provoked him to do this was a visit of Jo- hann Tetzel to Wittenberg to sell indulgences, partly to raise capital for the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Selling indulgences was intended to be a fast track through the tor- ment of purgatory, where Catholic priests told the people they would go when they died. Tet- zel was a shrewd marketer, making the merits of his product clear even to the simplest of people with this jingle: As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs!684 As Alister McGrath tells us in Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, “Luther was appalled by this practice. Forgiveness was meant to be a free gift of God!” As he saw the sale of indulgences to be a worrying symptom of a much deeper malaise in the Church, he sent a copy of his dispu- tations to Albert, the Archbishop of Mainz, who forwarded the criticisms to Pope Leo X.685 At the same time, an enterprising printer had the debating points translated into German. Within weeks they were appearing as pamphlets or wall posters throughout Germany, reaching various other countries.686 Although the Pope was initially busy with other political affairs, on 15th June 1520, Leo issued the bull Exsurge Domine ‘Arise, O Lord’,687 condemning Luther as a heretic. This papal decree was so-called because it had a large, embossed seal, bulla in Latin. Six months later, on 11th December,688 Luther famously burned the bull at the gates of Wittenberg, along with various works of canon law, which were the foundation of papal administration in the Church.689 As the result of this act of defiance and three other popular works that Luther published in German in 1520,690 on 3rd January 1521, the Pope issued another bull Decet Ro- 910 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY manum Pontificem excommunicating Luther.691 Luther was then summoned to appear before the Diet (imperial council) at Worms, which he did on 18th April 1521. Then on 26th May 1521, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued the Edict of Worms, declaring Luther to be a heretic and seeking his capture, for by this time, Luther had wisely slipped away from the city.692 On his way home, he was kidnapped by bandits and taken to Wartburg Castle under the protection of Frederick the Wise. During the nine months he spent there, Luther translated the New Testament into German, imple- menting his demand that what he thought was the word of God should be available for all.693 For at the heart of Luther’s theology was that the Bible is the ultimate foundation of all Christian belief and practice, which should be in the vernacular, so that the Bible could be interpreted by each individual in her or his own way. Luther made no distinction between clergy and laity, articulated in his doctrine of the ‘priesthood of all believers’, eliminating any notion of a ‘spiritual elite’. This move towards democracy did not go as far as acknowledging people’s gnostic experiences as the foundation for one’s spiritual life.694 So rather than discovering what we all share in common, the overall effect of the Reformation was to lead to a great diversity of religious beliefs and practices, often in conflict with each other, hardly conducive to returning Home to Paradise. At the age of forty-two, Luther, himself, married Katharina von Bora, a former nun aged twenty-six, with whom he was to have six children, four of whom reached adulthood.695 Thus Europe became divided between the Roman Catholic Church and the many Protestant Churches that were to appear in the centuries that followed, with much bloodshed. Even today, there is a deep divide between the Catholics and Protestants, although some healing is taking place, as in Northern Ireland. However, as recently as 16th November 2007, the Con- gregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican issued a document with the full authority of the Pope saying that the Protestant and Orthodox faiths are “not proper Churches”. This document stated that the Orthodox and Protestant churches suffer from a wound because they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope for Roman Catholicism is “the one true Church of Christ”.696 Although the number of adherents to the Roman Catholic Church is about the same as the total number of adherents to all the other Christian churches,697 it was the Protestant Rev- olution that principally influenced how most people live today in Western civilization, especially in the fields of science, culture, economics, and politics, as Tristram Hunt brilliantly illustrated in a series of television programmes in 2007.698 Paradoxically, it was this revolution, together with the Scientific Revolution, that was to lead to today’s secular society, further removed from Reality and the Truth than any other civilization in history. The word secular has a Latin root sæcularīs ‘of an age’, changing its root meaning about 1300 to distinguish the ‘temporal world’ from the ‘spiritual world’, supposedly denoting lay people living CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 911 in the world of time in contrast to people living in religious orders in the Timeless. As time is an illusion, it is the great Spiritual Renaissance taking place today that will awaken us from our slumbers, as we look at in the final chapter.

The first scientific revolution While the great scientific revolution currently taking place is emerging in the minds of many thousands of people around the world, the first Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was developed primarily by just four men—Nicolaus Copernicus (1473– 1543), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and Isaac Newton (1643– 1727)—although we should not forget the immense contribution made by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Of course, people like René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leib- niz (1646–1716), among others, also played a major role in the evolution of ideas around this time, but they were more mathematicians and philosophers than what we would call scientists today. But why do we divide the world of learning into various disciplines, into science and the humanities, into religion and mysticism, philosophy and psychology, science, medicine, and mathematics, and politics, economics, and business, for instance? As we saw on page 217 in Chapter 2, ‘Building Relationships’, the Universe has a deep underlying metaphysical structure, based on the Gnostic Ground of Being that we all share. So we can use IRL to integrate all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times into a coherent whole, thus healing the fragmented, split mind in Wholeness. The Scientific Revolution was a major stepping- stone in this direction, but it didn’t complete the task. Rather, there was much confusion in academia at that time, as there is today. Pythagoras of Samos coined the term philosophy to mean ‘love of wisdom’ because he was as much a mystic as a mathematician and scientist. But his successors called philosophers were not all mystics and so philosophy came to have an intellectual connotation, corrupting the original meaning of the word, for wisdom arises more from gnosis than from reason or revelation. For instance, Avicenna, mentioned briefly on page 877, called Aristotle ‘The Philosopher’,699 a term adopted by the Schoolmen, such as Thomas Aquinas.700 But Aristotle was very far from being a mystic, and so could not really be called a philosopher in the original meaning of the word. Leibniz attempted to bring the spiritual back into philosophy by coining the term philosophia perennis,701 the writings and sayings of the mystics that underlie all the world’s exoteric religions, although Bertrand Russell, a specialist in Leibniz, did not mention this term in his short review of Leibniz in History of Western Philosophy. However, he does say that Leibniz, “one of the supreme intellects of all time”, developed two systems of philosophy, one optimistic and shallow, the other profound, coherent, and amazingly logical, which he called 912 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY “largely Spinozistic”.702 Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most spiritual of the great philosophers. As a consequence, Spinoza, “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers”, “was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wick- edness,” Russell tells us sardonically.703 Indeed, Spinoza was very much a both-and thinker, creating a Hegelian synthesis that unified Descartes’ thesis that the truth is to be found only through reason and Pascal’s antithesis, which exalts faith and intuition over reason. The philosophy of Spinoza thus “resulted in a mystical acceptance of God and Nature”.704 So what is Nature? The word derives from the Latin natura ‘birth’ from natus, past participle of nasci ‘to be born’, from a PIE base, genə- ‘to give birth, to beget’, the root of many gen- words in English. So what is natural is that which is born from our Divine Source. The OED tells us that the native English word for nature is kind, with the same PIE base. So to be kind and friendly is our true nature, although what is called ‘human nature’ is often very far from being generous and warm-hearted. Reflecting the root meaning of the word, nature means ‘the essential qualities or properties of a thing’. In human terms, the Divine Essence that we all share is Love, which is why it is natural to be kind. Yet Nature has come to mean ‘the material world and its phenomena’, the one per cent of the Universe that we can access with our physical senses, a far remove from our Divine Es- sence. This superficial meaning has probably been influenced by the Greek word phusis ‘birth, origin, nature, inborn quality, creative power’, the root of physics. Somewhere along the line, as the mind moved further and further away from Reality, perhaps influenced by Aristotle’s Physics, what is called maya in the East, literally ‘deception, illusion, appearance’, came to be called the ‘real world’. And what is natural or essential came to be called supernatural, ‘outside the so-called natural world’, ‘attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces’.705 So what was called ‘natural philosophy’ in Newton’s day was neither natural nor philosophical in the original meanings of these words. Natural philosophy, one of three branches of philosophy along with moral and metaphysical philosophy in medieval universities, eventually came to be called physics. This change appears to have been influenced by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who had called physics the ‘phenomena of Nature’ in 1656, referring to natural philosophy as physics in 1678.706 Natural philosophy then became natural science, from Latin scientia ‘knowledge’ from sci- entem present participle of scire ‘to know’. Indeed, this was the original meaning of science in the fourteenth century. Science can also mean a particular branch of knowledge or study. For instance, in the Middle Ages, the term the seven (liberal) sciences was often used synonymously with the seven liberal arts.707 But it was not until 1833 that William Whewell coined the term scientist to refer to a systematically working natural philosopher.708 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 913 Today, the natural sciences are those disciplines that study the physical world, such as physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, the last of these also being called natural history, “the scientific study of animals and plants, especially as concerned with observation rather than experiment and presented in a popular form”. And natural means “existing in or derived from nature; not made, caused by, or processed by humans”, where nature means “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, and the landscape, as opposed to humans or human creations”.709 So psychology, sociology, and the arts lie outside science, the arts being defined as “the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance”. And creative means “relating to or involving the use of imagination or original ideas in order to create something”.710 Even the creativity of scientists in developing theories is excluded from science. So science, as it is formulated today, cannot answer the most fundamental question of our times: what is causing the pace of evolutionary change to accelerate exponentially? West- ern civilization has moved very far from Socrates’ counsel to ‘know yourself,’ which has led to the great spiritual, psychological, ecological, and economic crisis that we are going through today. Part of this problem is the great success of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For thousands of years human beings had been trying to make sense of the movement of the planets, from Greek planētēs ‘wanderer’, as in astéres planētai ‘wandering stars’, and of the Earth’s relationship to the Sun and the Moon. But it was not until just three or four hundred years ago that the underlying patterns were revealed. Copernicus kicked the ball off with De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, the Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543 on his deathbed. Despite its influence, it was unreadable and “an all-time worst seller”, Arthur Koestler tells us in his scholarly and entertaining study of Copernicus’ life and work. Not even Galileo seems to have read it, although Kepler did.711 Copernicus delayed publishing his treatise (he had completed it in 1530) not because of the fear of religious persecution, as is widely believed, but because he was afraid of the scorn and ridicule of his contemporaries and also because he was aware of the deficiencies in his model of the heavens. Copernicus’ hesitation seems to have a arisen because he suffered from a problem that many intelligent people can be afflicted by: he was very well aware that people who had not studied the subject to the depth that he had could nitpick at the details, not able to see the big picture, more concerned about whether a particular dab of paint was correctly placed or the ‘right’ colour. Actually, the period of Copernicus’ youth and middle years were a golden age of intellectual tolerance. The Book of Revolutions was not put on to the Index of the Roman Catholic Church until seventy-three years after it was published and the notorious trial of Galileo took place nearly a century after Copernicus’ death.712 Although Copernicus was essentially an Ar- 914 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY istotelian in his methods, it was the Aristotelians, seeking to maintain a geocentric view of the heavens, who were most opposed to a heliocentric perspective at first. Copernicus, the son of a wealthy magistrate and patrician in Torun in present-day Poland, lived a privileged life, which gave him plenty of time for his studies. At just twenty-four, his uncle, a Bishop, appointed Copernicus as a Canon at Frauenburg Cathedral by the Baltic Sea, although he did not go there or take Holy Orders for another fifteen years. Rather, from the ages of eighteen to thirty-two he attended the Universities of Cracow, Bologna, and Padua, studying a little of everything: Philosophy and Law, Mathematics and Medicine, and Astron- omy and Greek, graduating as a doctor of Canon Law at Ferrara in 1503, aged thirty.713 Eventually, Copernicus took up his post at Frauenburg, but his duties were not onerous, giving him the opportunity to study the heavens, or rather the works of his predecessors. As Kepler was to remark later on, “Copernicus tried to interpret Ptolemy rather than nature.”714 Herein lies a misconception that was to last until Koestler took the trouble to investigate it. In the introduction to Revolutions, Copernicus wrote that he needed thirty-four epicycles in his heliocentric system, in contrast to the eighty that Ptolemy had supposedly needed in his geocentric system. But as Copernicus worked on his model, he added more and more epicycles, ending up with forty-eight, by Koestler’s calculation. Moreover, Copernicus had exag- gerated the number of epicycles required in the Ptolemaic system; it was not eighty but forty. So “contrary to popular, and even academic belief, Copernicus did not reduce the number of circles, but increased them (from forty to forty-eight).”715 It is therefore not surprising that Co- pernicus hesitated to publish such an imperfect work, leading Koestler to call him the ‘Timid Canon’. Indeed, it is possible that Revolutions would never have been published if it had not been for George Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574), who was a young professor of Mathematics and As- tronomy at the University of Wittenberg and a convert to a sun-centred cosmology. Rheticus met Copernicus in 1539, when they were twenty-five and sixty-six, respectively. Although Co- pernicus had only previously circulated a manuscript to a few scholars on his ideas, called the Commentariolus, his reputation as “a fool who went against Holy Writ”, as Luther called him, had circulated by hearsay.716 Despite Copernicus’ reluctance to publish Revolutions, he allowed Rheticus to read it. Rheticus was most enthusiastic, writing a summary and introduction called Narratio Prima, the First Account, which was printed and circulated at the beginning of 1540. Eventually, with the assistance of Bishop Geise, a friend of Copernicus, Rheticus persuaded the old man to have his epoch-making treatise published. Rheticus, who called Copernicus the ‘Teacher’, copied the entire manuscript by hand, checking and correcting dubious figures, taking it with him to Nuremburg, where he arranged for the book to be printed. However, he did not com- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 915 plete this task, for he had been appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at Leipzig University, leaving Andreas Osiander, one of the co-founders of the Lutheran creed, to finish the job. Therein lies what Koestler calls “perhaps the greatest scandal in science”. Osiander wrote a preface to Revolutions in which he doubted the authenticity of the treatise, saying, “these hypotheses need not be true or even probable; if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is sufficient.” Specifically, Osiander demonstrated the improbability “of the hypotheses contained in this work” by saying that the epicycles of Venus in the book “contradicted the experience of all ages”. Copernicus apparently did not protest about this preface, assuming that he read it, most probably because he was a very sick man. As Koester said, “the Copernican revolution entered through the back door of history, preceded by the apologetic remark: ‘Please don’t take seriously—it is meant in fun, for mathematicians only, and highly improbable indeed.’”717 Regarding Rheticus’ subsequent role in the Copernican revolution, he was to play no further part in its promotion, despite living for another thirty years. Koestler surmises that this betrayal of Rheticus arose because in the dedication to Paul III that Copernicus wrote, there is no mention of Rheticus, although Bishop Geise is included among the friends who persuaded him to publish. As Koestler says, “the deliberate omission of Rheticus’ name can only be explained by the fear that the mention of a Protestant might create an unfortunate impression on Paul III.”718 Of course, in the evolution of the mind, whether phylogenetically or ontogenetically, it takes time for ideas to become fully mature, if they ever do. In the case of the heliocentric model of the solar system, all Copernicus did was introduce a framework for future developments. Kepler The next major figure in this story was Johannes Kepler, although he could not have made his discoveries without the extraordinary work of Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman born in Scania, present-day south-western Sweden, known as Tycho rather than Brahe, the Latin form of his Christian name Tyge, used from the age of fifteen.719 However, Tyge was not brought up by his parents, Otte Brahe and Beate Bille, whose fathers and grandfathers were all members of the Rigsraad, as was Otte himself, participating with the kings of Denmark in virtually every aspect of the daily affairs of state,720 not unlike the Privy Council in England. Rather, Tyge was effectively kidnapped in his second year by his uncle Jørgen Brahe and his wife Inger Oxe, who were childless, an upbringing which may well have influenced his pursuit of an academic career, quite different from his father and brothers. For while Jørgen was similarly of the warrior class,721 Inger was the sister of Peder Oxe, sharing some of his intellectual interests and abilities.722 Tycho’s interest in astronomy was sparked at the age of fourteen, when studying rhetorics and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen,723 by a partial eclipse of the Sun on 21st August 1560 (total in south-west Europe and much of Africa),724 which had been announced 916 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY beforehand. This prediction struck the boy as “something divine that men could know the motions of the stars so accurately that they were able a long time beforehand to predict their places and relative positions”.725 After three years in Copenhagen, on 14th February 1562 Ty- cho embarked on a Grand Tour of foreign universities,726 as was not uncommon for Danish aristocrats, returning to his ancestral home in Knutstorp when his father became terminally ill in 1571.727 Tycho was then invited by his maternal uncle Steen Bille to move with his morganatic wife Kirsten Jørgensdatter, probably the daughter of a local pastor, to Bille’s home at Herrevad Abbey, just over ten kilometres from Knutstorp, on the other side of a thickly forested ridge.728 It was there on 11th November 1572 that an event took place that was to change the course of history, signalling the formal beginning of Tycho’s career as an astronomer: As Tycho was returning from his alchemical laboratory that evening for supper, he noticed an unfamiliar starlike object in the sky, one not only clearly alien to the constellation in which it appeared but also brighter than any star or planet he had ever seen. If we can believe Tycho’s description of his discovery, he did not feel he could trust his own vision but had to appeal first to his own servants and then to some passing peasants.729 We now know this new star as supernova SN 1572 in the constellation of Cassio- peia, whose five major stars form the familiar W.730 However, in Tycho’s day, the existence of a new star was regarded as an impossibility. Although Tycho was familiar with Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system, the Aristotelians and Christians still held on to a Ptolemaic view of the physical universe, illustrated in Figure 11.38. Specifically, Aristotle saw the heavens as a nested set of crystalline spheres, the Sun, Moon, and planets moving in the space between their inner and outer walls, but nothing could move Unmoved Mover through these spheres. An eighth sphere Figure 11.38: Crystalline spheres was fixed and immutable, aptly named the firmament of stars, with the Unmoved Mover outside them. The only things that could change and move in the heavens were the Moon, Sun, and five known planets in their seven celestial spheres.731 It was thus believed that all other change, all generation and decay, were confined to the immediate vicinity of the Earth, the sublunary sphere.732 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 917 However, Tycho noted that the parallax of the object did not change from night to night during the following weeks and months of taking measurements in his observatory, showing that it could not possibly be sublunary. Although his cross staff and sextant were still rather primitive instruments compared with what he would later design, they were far more accurate than instruments available to other astronomers who similarly viewed the new star.733 So when Tycho published his findings that the new star was indeed fixed in a short treatise appropriately called De stella nova the following year,734 his reputation as an astronomer became established. With his fame assured, Tycho wished to move to the charming and civilized old town of Basle, but was persuaded by King Frederick II, who had a great love of learning, along with his wife Sophie,735 to stay in Denmark by an offer he could not refuse. In 1576, he was given the fiefdom of the island of Hven, also called Hveen, in Öresund, the strait between modern Denmark and Sweden, now Ven in Sweden, together with considerable financial support from the royal exchequer, for the rest of his life. In return, Tycho’s unique talents would “bring fame to Denmark and crucial scientific, technical, and political advice to the Danish court”.736 It was an arrangement of mutual benefit to both parties. Hven was ideal for Tycho’s purposes, being isolated from the distractions of normal court- ly life, in which his brothers participated. The island is a fertile plain, about 12 kms in circumference, mostly surrounded by steep cliffs up to 40 metres high. At Tycho’s time, there were nearly fifty householders on the island organized as an agricultural community; they believed that were freeholders, never before having had a lord of the manor to rule over them.737 It was a great shock to discover that they were not. It was here that Tycho ruled as a curious mixture of the old and the new: both as a feudal lord with seigneurial rights and as the director of what could be regarded as the first scientific laboratory in the world, marking the great transition that was beginning to take place in Eu- rope at that time. Tycho’s first task was to build a home for his family and himself, also serving as his observatory. Although as a feudal lord, Tycho could demand support from the farmers, who were each required to work for two days a week for him without pay, they did not have the skills to build such a prestigious building. So he needed to look elsewhere for what he called his familia,738 the trained architects, masons, carpenters, instrument makers, and many other skills that he needed to build and run a castle and observatory in the centre of the island, called Uraniborg, after Urania, the Muse of Astronomy.739 This is depicted in Figure 11.39 as a nineteenth century painting as imagined from Tycho’s original woodcut.740 918 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Even though this castle was modest in size compared with those built by other lords at the time, it was not until the autumn of 1581 that it was complete, by which time he had five children with his wife Kirsten, two others having died. This also established the ‘validity’ of his marriage. “According to the Jutish law, a woman who lived openly as a wife in a man’s house for three winters, eat- ing, drinking, and sleeping with him and carrying the keys to his household, was his wife.” The offspring of such a marriage were not bastards, but they could not inherit their father’s estates.741 However, even though Figure 11.39: Uraniborg Kirsten and Tycho had been living together for the best part of a decade, it was not until Uraniborg was complete that they had a home of their own and Kirsten could ‘keep the keys’.742 As well as a home for Tycho’s family and assistants, Uraniborg also housed his observatory and alchemical laboratory. What most concerned Tycho in terms of observations was that astronomy needed precise and continuous data. To this end, his most famous instrument was the great mural quadrant hanging on a west, north-south wall in Uraniborg, aligned with the meridian specifically for this purpose. Figure 11.40 is a coloured drawing of this quadrant and of the mural behind it, decorated by several artists, showing Tycho pointing at the front sight of the quadrant. “The engraving also shows a man in the lower right-hand corner noting the time of the observation, while another opposite him transcribes the observation in a log- book. These figures were not part of the mural. They are part of the drawing of the mural.”743 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 919 In terms of accuracy, the great mural quadrant had an accuracy of ten seconds, or a sixth of a minute, compared with other instruments before Tycho’s time, which had errors up to ten minutes in their observations, a remarkable 60-fold increase in precision.744 However, being fixed to a wall, this instrument could not measure azi- muths or horizontal angles and by 1583 Uraniborg was bursting at the seams. What Tycho needed was much larger instruments with access to all 360 degrees of the sky, with a much more secure foundation than could be obtained in the castle. To observe all altitudes between the horizon and zenith, he also needed to lower his instruments into the ground, in ‘crypts’ or ‘cellars’, illustrated in Figures 11.41 and 11.42.745

Figure 11.40: Great mural quadrant

Figure 11.41: Revolving azimuth quadrant Figure 11.42: Great equatorial a

To house these instruments, in the 1580s, Tycho constructed a purpose-built observatory on a small rise to the south of Uraniborg, which he called Stjerneborg ‘Star castle’, illustrated in Figure 11.43. Over the years, Tycho designed and built many fine instruments, proudly publishing a book on them in 1598 called Astronomiæ Instauratæ Mechanica, summarized with 920 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY an English commentary in a book available from the vistors’ centre on Hven, as the local res- idents still call the island.746 Now while Stjerneborg was being built, Tycho began to form his own planetary model, for he was unwilling to embrace the Copernican worldview wholeheartedly. After all, Coper- nicus had taken very few measurements, relying on those of others for his calculations, which were not as accurate as Tycho’s. In particular, Tycho didn’t like the Copernican idea that the Earth is a planet, moving around the sun like the other five known planets.747 So he devised a geoheliocentric model, with all the planets circling the sun, with the moon and the sun circling a stationary Earth, depicted in Figure 11.44, not entirely original.748 For he is reported as saying, “This is my model of the universe, based on years of work. Has anyone been able to prove that Copernicus’ theory is correct? That the Earth revolves around the Sun!” To which he apparently replied, “No, the way I’ve drawn it here—that’s the way it is.”749 However, in the early 1580s, he was far from being as confident as this statement seems to indicate. The main problem was that the orbits of Mars and the Sun must intersect for the model to match his measurements. But this would mean totally demolishing the classical idea that the planets moved within spaces between impenetrable crystalline spheres, illustrated in Figure 11.38 on page 918. Another key factor here was a comet in 1577, which Tycho measured as accurately as any of his contemporaries, indi- Figure 11.43: Stjerneborg ‘Star castle’ cating that it was moving through the orbits of the planets.750 But it was one thing for a new star to appear in the fixed firmament, beyond the planets; it was quite another for bodies to pass through the crystalline spheres.751 A fellow astronomer Tadeáš Hájek had published a book on the 1577 comet, indicating that the comet’s movement was sublunary.752 However, this did not make sense to Tycho. Yet, even when we are presented with evidence that refutes long-cherished ideas, it takes time for such intransigence to dissolve. So Tycho hesitated for several years to publish his findings on the comet and what has become known as the Tychonic planetary system, reluctant to share his thoughts except perhaps with the closest members of his familia. He wanted Mars’ orbit to encompass the Sun’s, but this did not make scientific sense; he couldn’t publish such a model and still be considered a reputable astronomer. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 921 This was the situation when his kinsman Erik Lange, who was to marry his beloved sister Sophie, visited Hven in the autumn of 1584 with Nicolaus Reimers, an autodidact from Hol- stein, who had taught himself Latin, Greek, and mathematics while working as a swineherd until the age of eighteen in 1569. Later, Reimers called himself Bär ‘the bear’, in Latin Ursus, a sobriquet he seems to have lived up to, as Tycho observed in a letter in 1588.753 At the time of his visit to Hven, Ursus would have been a prime candidate for joining Tycho’s team, but began to rub Tycho up the wrong way. “The problem was that Bär kept prying about the library and observatories, looking into Tycho’s books and manuscripts, fiddling with the instruments, taking notes and making drawings.”754 “Tycho became sufficiently distrustful of him, first, to exclude him from discussions of his system with Lange and the other guests and then to search and expel him from Hven,”755 which was later to lead to major difficulties in Kepler’s relationship with Tycho, as we see on page 935. Tycho’s doubts about his worldview seem to have diminished by the time Queen Sophie visited Hven in June 1586, but not all of them. By this time, Tycho had sufficient confidence to paint his planetary system on the ceiling of Stjerneborg, along with por- traits of famous astronomers. There was also a portrait of himself pointing to his system, asking his predecessors Quid si sic? ‘Is this it?’,756 apparently indicating some uncertainty. Eventually, he could hesitate no longer and in 1588 he published De mundi ætherei recentioribus phænomenis ‘Concerning the more recent phenomena of the ethereal world’, describing his planetary model along Figure 11.44: Tychonic planetary system with his discoveries about the 1577 comet using the printing press that he had built on the island.757 This compromise between a heliocentric and geocentric view of the heavens has its parallel in today’s scientific revolution, among people who cannot make up their minds whether Consciousness or the physical universe is the overall context for all our lives. On the face of it, Tycho’s quest for precision was a desire to check the validity of his system, to which he was much attached. However, psychologically, Koestler suggests that this quest was rather the rationalization of a deeper urge: “Meticulous patience, precision for precision’s sake was for him a kind of worship.”758 Be that as it may, his stupendous efforts were 922 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY of vital importance to Kepler and hence the evolution of the human mind in general. He lived for twenty years on Hven, collecting meticulous measurements of the movements of the planets and the positions of the stars. According to Christian Sørensen Longberg (1562-1647), called Longomontanus in Latin, who worked for Tycho for ten years between 1589 and 1601,759 there were 777 stars in Tycho’s star catalogue in 1592. Tycho, wishing to be able to say that he had catalogued a thousand stars, just as the ancients had, hurriedly instructed his assistants to take the additional measurements, which were not always up to Tycho’s high standard.760 By 1597, Tycho had spent over thirty years collecting data,761 but did not know how to interpret it, not unlike the problem that businesses face today with the mass of data they collect, giving rise to what is called ‘data mining’, an attempt to find patterns of meaningful information in the bewildering figures in modern databases. Tycho eventually moved from Hven at the age of fifty-one because he had lost favour with Christian IV, Frederick II’s son and heir, for whom he had cast a horoscope when he was born. Frederick had died in 1588, when Christian was nearly eleven, too young to govern. So during most of the 1590s, Denmark was ruled by a Regency Council, which continued to look favourably on Tycho’s activities, not the least because some of its members were Tycho’s relatives. However, this situation could not last, not the least because Tycho, as canon of the Chapel of the Three Holy Kings in Roskilde Cathedral, where Christian’s father and grandfather were buried, had neglected to repair the roof, as Christian had instructed him to do. So, for this and several other reasons, when Christian was crowned king in 18th August 1596 at the age of nineteen, he exercised his divine right as king to refuse to permanently endow Uraniborg for Tycho and his successors, as Tycho had been bargaining for, also removing Ty- cho’s valued fiefdom in Norway.762 I have read somewhere that at one time Tycho was receiving 1% of Denmark’s national revenue, a situation that obviously was not sustainable. At this, Tycho went into voluntary exile in June 1597,763 hoping that as the most famous astronomer in Europe he would soon be recalled by a grateful monarch, just as some of his relatives had been after they too went into exile. It was not to be. Tycho had overreached himself with a young king keen to exert his power.764 So he sought to re-establish Uraniborg in Bohemia, being appointed as Imperial Mathematicus soon after his arrival in Prague in July 1598 by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II,765 after the odious Ursus, who had wheedled his way into this prestigious position in 1591,766 had fled.767 Rudolf initally offered Tycho a castle at Benatky near Prague and a huge salary, which actually the Emperor was unable to pay.768 This offer was withdrawn in February 1601 because Rudolf wanted his Imperial Math- ematicus near him in Prague,769 where Tycho died of a bladder infection on 24th October 1601. Two days later,770 Rudolf appointed Johannes Kepler as Tycho’s successor in Prague, the two astronomers having first met at Benatky on 4th February 1600.771 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 923 How this meeting and subsequent appointment came about is one of the most amazing stories in the evolution of the mind. Given their quite different backgrounds, it was a most unlikely meeting, but sometimes evolution unfolds in quite mysterious ways, not the least when it takes a major change in direction, then as now, on its relentless search for Wholeness. So let us see what we can learn from one of most fascinating figures in the entire history of science, applying the lessons learned to today’s scientific revolution.772 We know a great deal about Kepler’s life and work because he wrote voluminously about both his creative process and his psychodynamic relationships with both himself and the society he found himself in.773 Regarding his personal life, Carola Baumgardt published a revealing collection of his letters in Figure 11.45: Johannes Kepler 1952, comparing Kepler to Mozart. As she said, “Both … were filled with an unshakeable serenity in the face of overwhelming odds in life and in the development of their gifts. … They were both endowed with a gay sense of inner freedom, which allowed them to colour even highly vexatious situations around them with a golden tint.” Baumgardt then went on to say:774 Despite their rather disparate fields of activity, in their work, too, Kepler and Mozart reveal the same seldom united gifts: utmost aesthetic grace and charm with intellectual accuracy and precision. There is a radiance of rare beauty, not only in Mozart’s world of tones, but also in many reflections and statements of Kepler; and there is the exhilarating clarity, not only in the exact thinking of Kepler, but also in the musical structure of the great Mozartian compositions. In terms of his scientific discoveries, Kepler described in great detail the way that he had arrived at his conclusions, warts and all, unique in the annals of science, as we see on page 944. Kepler was also amazingly open and honest about how he saw himself and his relations, friends, colleagues, teachers, and patrons. In 1586, when he was 25, he wrote a frank description of his family background, applying his skills at drawing up horoscopes, extending this horoscope for the rest of his life. In the same year, he wrote a remarkable piece of self- analysis, which Koestler describes as being more unsparing than Rousseau’s.775 Here is just a short section of what Kepler wrote, referring to himself in the third person, inspiring Kitty Ferguson, a professional musician before becoming a writer about science, to write an insight- ful book on the strange partnership between Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler that revolu- tionized science called The Nobleman and his Housedog, presenting this intriguing story in wonderfully clear terms: That man [Kepler] has in every way a dog-like nature. His appearance is that of a little house dog. His body is agile, wiry, and well-proportioned. Even his appetites were the same: he liked gnawing bones 924 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever his eyes chanced on he grabbed; yet, like a dog, he drinks little and is content with the simplest food. His habits were also like a house dog. He continually sought the goodwill of others, was dependent on others for everything, ministered to their wishes, never got angry when they reproved him and was anxious to get back into their favour. He was constantly on the move, ferreting among the sciences, politics, and private affairs, including the most trivial kind; always following someone else, and imitating his thoughts and actions. He is impatient with conversation but greets visitors just like a dog; yet when the smallest thing is snatched from him he flares up and growls. He tenaciously persecutes wrong-doers—that is, he barks at them. He is malicious and bites people with sarcasms. He hates many people exceedingly and they avoid him, but his masters are fond of him. He has a dog-like horror of baths, tinctures, and lotions. His recklessness knows no limits; yet he takes good care of his life. 776 Kepler tells us in his horoscope that he was conceived on 16th May AD 1571, at 4.37 a.m., and was born on 27th December at 2.20 p.m., after a pregnancy lasting 224 days, 9 hours, and 53 minutes (7 weeks premature).777 He was born in Weil der Stadt in Swabia about 30 kms west of Stuttgart, the capital of the Duchy of Württemberg, which took an enlightened approach to social matters, giving those who merited it a free education to university level. While both Kepler’s grandparents were civic leaders, being Bürgermeisters or mayors of their respective towns, the family, which had been ennobled in 1433, was in decline.778 Kepler’s paternal grandfather Sebald was a furrier and his maternal grandfather Melchior Guldemann an innkeeper in Eltingen, half-way to Stuttgart, today a suburb of Leonberg, where Kepler was to begin his education. However, Kepler’s father Heinrich was a mercenary, often away from home fighting wars, which, it seems, he continued at home.779 This is how Kepler described his parents and paternal grandparents. Grandfather Sebald was “proud and arrogant in manner, hot-tempered, impetuous, stubborn, and sensual”; grandmother Katherine was “very restless, clever, inclined to lie, but zealous in religious matters, slender, of fiery nature, lively, ever on the move, jealous, spiteful, resentful”; father Hein- rich was “vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome, and doomed to a bad end”; and mother Katherine, who was a herbalist and was later to be tried as a witch, was “small, thin, dark-complexioned, garrulous, quarrelsome, and generally unpleasant”.780 Kepler’s mother’s acquaintances regarded her as an evil-tongued shrew, responding to Heinrich’s harsh, rude treatment with pouting and stubbornness.781 Kepler tells us that his father, who had treated his mother extremely ill, finally went into exile in 1589, when Kepler was 17, never to be heard of again.782 While being brought up in such an unstable and dysfunctional family must have been pretty ghastly for such an intelligent, sensitive, and peace-seeking boy as Johannes, it is just such a background that evolution needs to make a break with the past, also absolutely essential in these troubled times we live in today. There were just two incidents that involved Jo- hannes’ parents that sparked his interest as a boy, pointing towards his later calling, occurring when he was six and eight. Sometime between 13th November 1577 and 26th January 1578, CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 925 Kepler’s mother took him up a hill in Leonberg to observe the comet of 1577.783 Then on 31st January 1580, Kepler’s father took him to see a total eclipse of the moon in Ellmendingen, 55 kms to the north-west, where the family had moved because of impoverishment.784 This move had interrupted Kepler’s education. The previous year he had begun his school- ing in Leonberg at the German Schreibschule, quickly being transferred to the Latin school, because his teachers recognized an exceptional young mind. In such schools, pupils were required to speak Latin rather than German to each other even during their leisure periods. However, the Kepler family finances were to improve and Johannes was freed of working as an agricultural labourer, able to complete the three-year course at the Latin school in five years. In his last year there, at the age of twelve, Kepler recalls an incident that tells us much about his questioning approach to life and learning. “He heard a sermon in Leonberg given by a young deacon who spoke vehemently and at length against the Calvinists.” Kepler was much disturbed by this sermon, determined to make it a practice to investigate the truth for himself rather than take any authority’s word for what the scriptures, for instance, might mean. Besides, even though he was a practising Lutheran, he felt that the Calvinists had every right to practice their Christian faith in their own way. As Kepler later recalled, “There was nothing I could state that I could not also contradict,” a classic expression of all-inclusive, both-and thinking, showing that his innate innocence and intelligence were not completely stultified by the culture in which he lived, as is normal.785 However, while Kepler spent a lifetime searching for the hidden harmony in the Universe, like Pythagoras, it is unlikely that he learnt about the hidden harmony of Heraclitus, whose both-and mystical philosophy of change was rejected by both Plato and Aristotle. If he had, this would have opened his eyes even further than was possible at his time, or at any other time during the past two and a half thousand years. As an exceptionally talented student and with his pious disposition, Kepler then spent the next four years at two seminaries in preparation for attending university and being trained as a clergyman. To this end, on 16th October 1584 he moved to the lower seminary at Adelberg, 67 kms to the east of Leonberg according to Google Earth, transferring to the upper seminary on 26th November 1586 at Maulbronn, 45 kms to the north.786 The curriculum broadened at the seminaries, adding Greek to Latin, and embracing, besides theology, the study of the pagan classics, rhetorics and dialectics, mathematics, and music.787 Being away at boarding school, able to devote his time to his studies, must have been a great relief from the turmoil at home. However, it wasn’t all plain sailing. As an intelligent, peace-loving, both-and thinker, he could get into conflict with his either- or fellow students, candidly describing how several of his school friends became enemies in what we can call his journals.788 Not only was Kepler a free thinker, often questioning the 926 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY status quo that his fellows espoused, he was also good at his conventional studies, making his comrades envious. As Kepler asked, “Why were all of them jealous of competence, industry of work, progress and success?”789 Max Caspar, Kepler’s biographer, also tells us, “He aroused indignation and rebellion among his comrades when under pressure from above he became an informer,” which he later tried to put right by putting in a good word for the wrong-doers.790 All in all, it seems that he was pretty unpopular at boarding school, not really fitting in with the prevailing ethos; such is often the fate of intelligent evolutionary pioneers. In September 1588, Kepler passed the baccalaureate (BA) examination at Tübingen Uni- versity, but because there was not an immediate vacancy, he had to spend another year at Maulbronn before moving south to the Stift, which he did on 17th September 1589, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. The first two years at Tübingen, 54 kms south of Leonberg, were devoted to preparation for an MA before three years of theological studies, further expanding the curriculum with Hebrew, ethics, astronomy, and physics.791 Kepler’s astronomy teacher was Michael Mästlin, whose study of the comet of 1577 Tycho had much admired. Although Mästlin, who was to be a major supporter of Kepler’s early career as an astronomer, was required to teach the Ptolemaic planetary system, privately he introduced the Copernican system to his students. Kitty Ferguson has written wonderfully on what this heliocentric planetary model meant to Kepler: “In a universe created in the image of God, it made sense that the Sun, the brightest and most splendid of all objects, the source of light and warmth, should symbolize its Creator and be the centre of all things.”792 Kepler thus moved Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover from beyond the stars, illustrated in Fig- ure 11.38 on page 918, to the very heart of the known universe, a spiritual notion that was to play a central role in his discovery of the three scientific laws of planetary motion, as we see on page 949. But before this could happen, Kepler had to complete his studies as a theologian. Accord- ingly, on 10th August 1591, he passed the master’s examination in second place among fourteen candidates. He then had to apply for a renewal of his scholarship, his teachers supporting his application with these glowing words: “Because the above-mentioned Kepler has such a superior and magnificent mind that something special may be expected of him, we wish, on our part, to continue to that Kepler his stipend, as he requests, also because of his special learning and ability.”793 However, Kepler was not destined for a career as a theologian. Before he could complete his studies in the autumn of 1594, a request for a mathematics teacher was made to Tübingen University from the Protestant School in Graz, 677 kms away in Styria, in southern Austria. Caspar thinks that the Tübingen senate recommended Kepler for the post, not so much because of a suspicion about his heterodox religious views, as is sometimes suggested, but simply because “he was by far the most suitable candidate for the teaching position there, the only CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 927 one worthy of consideration and likely to bring honour to Tübingen University.”794 At first, Kepler doubted whether he should accept such a post in a distant land. He saw himself as a theologian, not as a mathematician teaching astronomy, where mathematics was mostly applied at the time. However, if it was God’s will that he should do so, who was Kepler to refuse? Besides, he had noticed how his fellow students would often find every excuse to avoid being sent abroad. So being “tougher than I actually was”, he resolved to be better than them and follow the calling.795 Furthermore, as an open-minded, questioning scholar, he must have felt constrained by the rigid discipline of academia. So accepting the position of District Mathematician and teacher at a Protestant Stiftsschule appealed to his inborn spirit of adventure, a risk he was willing to take on condition that if it did not work out he could return to the service of the Duke of Württemberg, who had given his blessing. Accordingly, on 13th March 1594, in the Julian calendar still being followed by Protestant Swabia, Kepler took leave of his beloved university, arriving in Graz 18 days later on 11th April in the Gregorian calendar, which had been adopted by the rulers of Catholic Styria, ‘losing’ ten days on the journey.796 Just over a year later, on 9th/19th July 1595, Kepler had a momentous eureka moment that was to guide the remainder of his life. When Kepler accepted the post of District Mathema- tician in Graz, he was by no means a master of mathematics and astronomy. So, wrote Kepler in the preface to Mysterium Cosmographicum, ‘The Cosmic Mystery’ or ‘The Secret of the Uni- verse’, published the following year, “I threw myself with the full force of my mind on this subject. There were three things in particular about which I persistently sought the causes as to why they were such and not otherwise.”797 1. There are six planets. Why not more or fewer? 2. Each planet moves at a certain speed. Why not faster or slower? 3. The planets orbit at certain distances from the Sun. Why those distances and not others?798 Now professional astronomers had not asked these simple questions before because they could not be answered within the astronomical framework that existed at the time. It takes natural childhood innocence to ask questions that conservative scholars do not think worthwhile. A similar situation holds today. Scientists do not enquire why they are causing the pace of change in society to accelerate exponentially because this most fundamental of all questions cannot be answered within the framework of materialistic, mechanistic science, as this book seeks to demonstrate with the utmost clarity possible. The main reason for astronomers’ lack of curiosity is that Aristotle had defined physics as the subject that studied what he identified as the four causes, while astronomy was the practical application of mathematics, not concerned about such theoretical matters.799 But math- 928 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ematical calculations could not answer the questions why the outer planets not only have a longer way to travel around the Sun but also do so more slowly the greater the distance from the Sun. Kepler’s answer to these questions was “There is a single moving soul in the centre of all the spheres, that is, in the Sun, and it impels each body more strongly in proportion to how near it is.”800 In the second edition of Mysterium Cosmographicum, Kepler made this note on what he had written twenty-five years earlier: If for the word soul ‘animus’ you substitute the word force ‘vis’, you have the very same principle on which the Celestial Physics is established in the Commentaries of Mars [the original title of New Astronomy]. … For once I believed that the cause that moves the planets was precisely a soul. … But when I pondered that this moving cause grows weaker with distance, and that the Sun’s light also grows thinner with distance from the Sun, from that I concluded that this force is something corporeal, that is, an emanation which a body emits, but an immaterial one.801 As Koestler tells us, the proposal that there must be a force emanating from the sun which drives the planets around their orbits was the first time since antiquity that an attempt was made not only to describe heavenly motions in geometrical terms, but to assign them a physical cause. The separation between astronomy and physics that had lasted for two thousand years became reconciled, helping to heal the split mind,802 a therapeutic process that is still, to this day, not complete. Nevertheless, such epiphanies cannot happen without months if not years of preparatory reflection beforehand, as Kepler tells us in the Preface to Mysterium. And, as he well knew, such insights do not necessarily emerge fully formed; they often require much development before they reach maturity. For as Thomas A. Edison famously said, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” In the event, it was to take another twenty years before the full fruits of this eureka moment were realized. Kepler began finding answers to his questions when he drew Figure 11.46 on his black- board during a lesson in Graz, with the original caption, “Diagram of the great conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, and their leaps through eight signs, and crossings through all four quar- tiles of the Zodiac”.803 This shows the succession of Great Conjunctions of Jupiter and Sat- urn, which take about 12 and 30 years to circle the Sun, respectively, before Jupiter catches up and passes Saturn, against the background of the Zodiac. Each of these cycles lasts twenty years. For instance, there was a conjunction twelve years earlier in 1583, to be followed by 2, 3, and 4 in 1603, 1623, and 1643.804 However, conjunction 4 does not come back to the border between Aries and Pisces because each conjunction spans the ecliptic by 117°, a reduction of 3° from the triangular 120°. So as the conjunctions are 9° apart going round the ecliptic, it takes 40 conjunctions for the entire cycle to return to the starting point, 800 years later. However, when Kepler looked at this diagram, it appeared as if it was constructed with equilateral triangles, whose vertices and edges trace two circles with radii in the ratio of 2:1, CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 929

ᄦ ᄥ

34 28

37 25 40 22

3 19 ᄤ ᄧ

6 16

9 13

12 10 15 7 ᄣ

ᄨ

18 4

21 1

24 38

ᄩ 35 ᄮ

30 32

33 29

36 26

39 ᄪ 23 ᄭ

20 2

5 14

11 8

ᄬ ᄫ

Figure 11.46: Kepler’s inscribed ‘triangles’ which he said is “almost the same as that between Saturn and Jupiter”.805 For as we saw on page 226 in Chapter 3, ‘Unifying Opposites’, a curve is both the locus of a moving point and the envelope of a moving line. For Kepler, this was not just a coincidence; it must be part of the Divine Plan, which he was endeavouring to discover. So he set out to inscribe a succession of polygons in the triangle’s incircle, illustrated in Figure 11.47 (not in his book), to see if the ratios of the polygon’s ex- and incircles matched the ratios of the distances of the other planets to the Sun. They didn’t. 930 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Undaunted, Kepler realized that while there are an infinite number of regular polygons, there are just five regular polyhedra, called Pythagorean or Platonic. Besides, space is three-dimensional, so it seemed that the circum- and in- spheres of these classic figures could constrain or define the orbits of the six planets that were known at the time. Accord- ingly, Kepler set out to match the ratios of the circum- and inradii of the five regular polyhedra with the ratios of the mean distances of adjacent planets to the Sun, as illustrated in Table 11.18 from Chapter XIV of Mysterium.806 The Figure 11.47: Nested polygons and numbers in the first column of figures were taken from Book their ex- and incircles XIII in Euclid’s Elements, as he explained in the previous chapter. They are the incircles of the cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, and octahedron, respectively, where the circumcircle is 1000 units. They are presented in this way because decimals were not in use at this time. The second column of figures show the ratios of the mean distances of adjacent planets to the Sun, derived from Copernicus’ Revolutions. Bk. V of Copernicus Saturn Ch. 9 ⎧⎫is 1000, ⎧ Jupiter 577 ⎫ But ⎧635 ⎪⎪Jupiter highest ⎪ Mars 333 ⎪ according ⎪333 Ch. 14 If lowest ⎪⎪ ⎪ ⎪ ⎪ ⎨⎬Mars point to Ch. 19 point of ⎨ Earth 795 ⎬ ⎨757 ⎪⎪should ⎪ ⎪ Copernicus ⎪ ⎪⎪Earth ⎪ Venus 795 ⎪ ⎪794 Ch. 21 & 23 ⎩⎭Venus be of ⎩Mercury 577 ⎭ it is ⎩723 Ch. 27 or 707 Table 11.18: Kepler’s mapping of polyhedra’s radii to ratios of planets’ mean distances to sun Kepler rejoiced to see that the figures for Mars and Venus were the same or nearly so and that the match for Earth was not bad. In the case of Mercury, he cheated a bit, taking the mid- or interadius of the sphere that touches the edges of the octahedron (707), rather than the insphere (577), which touches the faces. As he said, “only in the case of Jupiter is there an undue discrepancy, which however at such a great distance should surprise nobody.”807 However, the figures that Kepler was using from Copernicus were further from the distances that we know today than he realized. In the case of Saturn and Jupiter, their mean distances from the Sun are about 1,433 and 779 million kms, which would have given him a figure of 544, rather closer to 577 than 635. Furthermore, these distances give a ratio of 1.84, much closer to 2, the ratio between the circum- and incircle of the triangle, which set this line of thinking in motion. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 931 Table 11.19 shows a modern update of Table 11.18, the formulae for the circum- and inradii being based on a polygon edge of 2, where τ = ()51+ ⁄ 2 , the golden ratio.808 This is the arrangement of the polyhedra that Kepler came up with, although you can see that he could have interchanged the cube with the octahedron and dodecahedron with the icosahedron, with a similar result. But in all cases except Saturn/Jupiter, the figures match less well than the Copernican figures that Kepler used.809 If he had known the modern figures, perhaps he would have given up this line of thought much earlier. It is curious to note that of all the biographies and commentaries I have read about Kepler’s creative process, no one has thought to draw Table 11.19. Polyhedra Planets R /R Mean distance from Name Circumradius Inradius C/I a b Name (Cop) Sun, millions kms (R)

1,433 Saturn 1.84 3 1 1.73 cube (1.57) 779 Jupiter 3 1 3.42 tetrahedron ------3.00 2 6 (3.00) 228 Mars 52⁄ τ 1.52 dodecahedron 3τ ------1.26 4 5 (1.32) 150 Earth 2 τ 1.38 icosahedron 4 5 τ ------1.26 3 (1.26) 108 Venus 2 1.87 octahedron 2 --- 1.73 3 (1.38) 58 Mercury

Table 11.19: Modern mapping of polyhedra’s radii to ratios of planets’ mean distances to sun Now it is vitally important to note here that for Kepler, this polyhedral model was a priori, emerging directly from the divine plan of the Creator, expressed in Platonic mathematical objects, which are eternal and about which there could be no argument. The number, arrangement, and size of planetary orbits round the Sun could therefore be determined directly from the Divine, rather than calculated a posteriori, from observations.810 To understand the significance of what Rhonda Martens calls Kepler’s ‘archetypal meth- odology’,811 it is important not to look at the numbers, which, as we can see, don’t really bear much scrutiny. Rather, what gave Kepler complete confidence in his mental model was his mystical experience of Wholeness. So remembering that the True Nature of everyone on Earth is Wholeness, we can use his inner experiences as a mirror of our own mystical sense of 932 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Wholeness and feel into what he must have been feeling. Although Kepler was acutely aware of his inner world, for he often described it, he couldn’t fully understand what was happening to him because mysticism was outlawed by both religion and science, based as they are, then as now, on the first and second pillars of unwisdom. Nevertheless, it is crystal clear that it was gnosis that informed all his scientific and spiritual endeavours throughout his life, even though, for him, the Divine was more transcendent than immanent. If he had said otherwise, he would quickly have been condemned as a heretic. So as James R. Voelkel points out, Ke- pler “did not experience some sort of conversion experience and become a modern scientist”,812 far removed from Reality. Indeed, even in Kepler’s lifetime scientific, mathematical models became separated from the Spirit that had brought them into being, dispirited, if you like, using OED’s first definition of this word, which has since become obsolete. It is therefore not surprising that materialistic science has become so dispiriting to many. We can correct this tragic situation by noting that although the a priori polyhedral model did not work out in the way that Kepler had hoped, this basic principle has been resurrected in IRL, as pointed out on page 259 in Chapter 4, ‘Transcending the Categories’. Furthermore, as we saw in Section ‘Mathematical mapmaking’ in Chapter 1, ‘Starting Afresh at the Very Beginning’ on page 75, the Platonic solids can be seen as an example of mathematical graphs, which provide the underlying structure for the Universe. So the URT brings Kepler’s initial eureka moment to its glorious conclusion. But let us return to Kepler’s epic journey, battling against almost insurmountable odds. He grandly called his 88-page book The Introduction to the Cosmographical Essays, Containing the Cosmographical Mystery of the Marvellous Proportion of the Celestial Spheres, and of the True and Particular Causes of the Number, Size, and Periodic Motions of the Heavens, Demonstrated by Means of the Five Regular Geometric Bodies,813 although A. M. Duncan gives a slightly different translation in The Secret of the Universe, calling this book a Forerunner to later ones. Although Mästlin, his former astronomy teacher, did not like the idea of a force that moves the planets, for this would “lead to the ruin of astronomy”,814 he nevertheless agreed to be the ‘midwife’ in Kepler’s metaphorical words,815 helping to publish the book in Tübingen in March 1597, althought the title page says 1596.816 Kepler also needed to find a way of expressing his mental model in his external world. To this end, he drew two diagrams, reproduced in Figure 11.48 from the first and last pages of Mysterium Cosmographicum available in Latin on the Web.817 He needed two pictures because the ratio of the edges of the five polyhedra moving outwards are 1.00: 0.94: 0.80: 5.49: 6.72. The first three are small compared to the last two. On a visit to his ailing grandfathers in 1596, Kepler also asked the Duke of Württemburg for assistance in building a three-dimensional model of his polyhedral system. However, even though the Duke was well dis- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 933 posed to such a project, it never materialized.818 I face a similar problem today. I have constructed a prototypical three-dimensional model of the Ocean of Consciousness, depicted in Figure 4.5 on page 256 in Chapter 4, ‘Transcending the Categories’. But without the inner experience of Wholeness, I really don’t know how meaningful this model is.

Figure 11.48: Kepler’s model of universe, with detail on right The first copies of Mysterium arrived in Graz from the printers shortly after Kepler was married on 27th April 1597 to Barbara Müller, a twice-widowed well-to-do twenty-three-year- old mother of a seven-year-old daughter Regina, who Kepler was to grow very fond of.819 The task was now to market the book, by distributing it to scholars around Europe. This was to lead to Kepler being appointed Imperial Mathematicus four years later. It was a bumpy ride, with four major factors leading up to this momentous appointment. First, Kepler got caught up in the Counter-Reformation in Graz and its dogmatic opposite in Tübingen. Secondly, he became embroiled in a war that flared up between Tycho and Ur- sus. Thirdly, while Tycho and Kepler needed each other, they did so for different reasons. Having somewhat different agendas, they did not fully trust each other when they met. Fourthly, Kepler had a couple of influential patrons, who helped smooth the tempestuous journey that he was embarking on. Let us look at each of these in turn, for they have their parallels in today’s scientific revolution. Just as Tycho had effectively been driven out of Denmark by a nineteen-year-old king who was keen to assert his power, Kepler was banished from Graz by Ferdinand, the Archduke of Inner Austria, first cousin to Rudolf, destined to become the Holy Roman Emperor himself in 1619.820 Ferdinand, educated by the Jesuits, took the oath of allegiance on 16th December 1596 as an eighteen year old and after a visit to the Pope eighteen months later vowed to lead 934 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY his country back to Catholicism, purging Styria of Lutheranism. To this end, on the 23rd and 28th September 1598, he ordered collegiate preachers, rectors, and teachers to leave Graz under threat of death, first within eight days, then immediately. This included Kepler, who duly went to Hungary, leaving his wife and stepdaughter behind.821 Although the Lutheran school where Kepler taught had been closed, he was still the Dis- trict Mathematician, famous for having written a book. So perhaps on the strength that this position was neutral—neither Catholic nor Protestant—he was allowed to return to his family a month later. But now knowing that his position in Graz was precarious, Kepler then appealed to his friend Mästlin to get him a job back in Tübingen. He knew that he could no longer return to theology. But maybe he could obtain a position as a professor of philosophy or study medicine. However, Kepler was not welcome in his home country in any capacity and Mästlin was unable to help. Not only was Kepler sympathetic to the hated Calvinists, he was also on friendly terms with the Catholics, willingly adopting the Gregorian calendar because it made more sense. Indeed, Kepler called himself catholic, in the literal meaning of the word, ‘regarding the whole’,822 as we saw on page 861. Things came to a head on 27th July 1600, when Ferdinand issued a decree ordering all burghers, doctors, and similar middle-class inhabitants to appear before a commission for an examination of their faith. Kepler appeared before the commissioners on 2nd August and was told that if he did not convert to Catholicism with six weeks and three days (45 days) he would be banished. This he refused to do and at the end of September, two weeks late, he left Graz with his family and two carts of possessions travelling north to Linz, but not really sure where he was meant to go, Prague, Tübingen, or elsewhere.823 He was in limbo, just as Tycho had been when he left Denmark in June 1597. Tycho first knew of Kepler’s existence and book in March 1598 when staying in Wandsbek Castle near Hamburg, three months after Kepler had written to him from Graz. In the same delivery, Tycho also received a copy of a book that Ursus had published the previous year without the censors’ permission called De astronomicis hypothesibus ‘Astronomical Hypothe- ses’.824 In this book, Ursus was libellously abusive to Tycho, supporting his accusations by publishing a letter that Kepler had naively written to Ursus in November 1595, when Kepler was filled with the excitement at having found what he thought was the secret of the universe, but published without Kepler’s permission. In this letter, Kepler effusively wrote, in fan-mail style, “the bright glory of thy fame makes thee rank first among the mathematicians of our time like the sun among the minor stars.” However, two years later, Kepler called Tycho in his letter, “the prince of mathematicians not only of our time but of all times”.825 Kepler had thus stirred up a hornet’s nest, described in great scholarly detail by Edward Rosen in a 384-page book called Three Imperial Mathematicians: Kepler Trapped between Ty- cho Brahe and Ursus. Basically, what happened is that in 1588, the same year that Tycho had CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 935 published De mundi, Ursus had published Fundamentum astronomicum ‘Foundation of As- tronomy’, claiming Tycho’s much researched model as his own. Tycho knew that Ursus had plagiarized his system because on folio 41 of Foundation of Astronomy Ursus had printed a model of the solar system with the orbit of Mars completely encircling that of the Sun,826 an idea that Tycho had been toying with when Ursus visited Hven in 1584, but which Tycho knew did not fit the figures. However, Tycho did not attempt to prosecute Ursus at the time because he, like other reputable astronomers, such as Mästlin, could see that Ursus’s book was poorly thought through, to put it gently. The only people who did not know that Ursus was a charlatan was the Emperor in Prague and his advisors, for Rudolf employed Ursus more as an astrologer than as an astronomer. Despite Kepler’s faux pas, when Tycho read Mysterium, he could see a great creative mind, even though he did not agree with Kepler’s heliocentric approach, treating the Earth just like the other planets. So in April 1598, Tycho wrote a friendly letter to Kepler, inviting the latter to visit the former in northern Germany.827 Tycho also mentioned his own observations, ig- niting in Kepler an overwhelming desire to see them.828 However, receiving the two packages from Kepler and Ursus on the same day provoked Tycho to persecute Ursus to the end, even after the latter’s death in August 1600. So when eventually Kepler did join Tycho’s team in Prague, he was asked about the same time to write a pamphlet called In Defence of Tycho against Ursus, a chore that Kepler detested, as he had already apologized for his mistakes and because he did not agree with either of Tycho’s or Ursus’s models.829 After nearly two years of difficult communications between Tycho and Kepler—spatially, cognitively, and psychologically—the latter learned from Hans Georg Hewart von Hohen- burg, the Bavarian Chancellor in Munich, that Tycho had been appointed Imperial Mathe- matician in Prague, just 536 kms from Graz, compared with 1,096 kms to Tycho’s temporary residence in Wandsbek in 1597, or the 1,376 kms to Hven, where Tycho had previously lived. Hewart, much interested in the leading edge of human learning, had written to Kepler about some chronological questions, matching major historical events to the arrangement of the heavens at the time. Although this involved many tedious calculations, Kepler gave Hewart what he wanted, establishing a fruitful correspondence that was to continue for many years.830 Furthermore, Hewart lent Kepler books that he could not otherwise find in Graz,831 and, as a political networker, he promoted Kepler’s work within the Catholic Establish- ment.832 However, even Prague was not easy for Kepler to reach given his limited finances. Mirac- ulously, another fairy godmother appeared in the form of Johann Friedrich Hoffmann, Baron of Grünbüchel and Strechau, a member of the Styrian diet and councillor to Emperor Rudolf, who enabled him to travel to Prague. Hoffmann, who had a library of some 3,000 books, a few of which perhaps he had read, was travelling from Graz to Prague on 1st January 1600, 936 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY and could give Kepler a free lift in his carriage. Tycho heard that Kepler was staying as a guest of Hoffmann in Prague and warmly invited him to Benatky, saying, “You will come not so much as a guest but as a very welcome friend and highly desirable participant and companion in our observations of the heavens”.833 Nevertheless, despite this friendly overture, the next twenty months, until Tycho’s death, were far from easy. The central problem was their different agendas. Tycho, at the age of fifty- three, needed someone to complete his life’s work. Longomontanus, a faithful assistant, was not up to the job, and Franz Gansneb Tengnagel von Camp, a Dutch nobleman, who was to marry Tycho’s daughter Elisabeth when she was six months pregnant in June 1601, was more a politician than a scientist. Tycho really needed Kepler’s great creativity and diligence, even though he knew that Kepler favoured the Copernican system, rather than his own geoheliocentric one. Caspar suggests that even though Tycho favoured an a posterori approach,834 Ty- cho enticed Kepler to take up this project because he had the measurements that would enable the latter to verify the a priori, polygonal model.835 On the other hand, Kepler did not see himself as an amanuensis.836 As he had told Hewart shortly before travelling to Prague, in the summer of 1599 he had sketched out the overall structure of a five-part magnum opus, to be called Harmonice mundi ‘The Harmony of the World’, integrating geometry, music, poetry, architecture, and astronomy into a glorious whole, drafting much of the content on mathematics and music, as a follow-on to Mysteri- um.837 But on arrival in Benatky, he did not feel that his vision and aspirations were being respected, not the least because Tycho’s “haughty nature extorted subordination and adapta- tion from everyone who was dependent on him”. Furthermore, there was much hustle and bustle in the castle, as Tycho attempted to build a new Uraniborg there, a far remove from the complete freedom in his studies that Kepler had enjoyed in Graz. There was therefore little opportunity for Kepler to have ‘quality time’ with Tycho in an environment of mutual respect.838 This was absolutely essential if Tycho and Kepler were to agree on a job specification and contract of employment. Kepler was did not fit easily into teams, following instructions, the party line, and the flavour of the month. Rather, he was a highly original thinker, working everything out for himself, guided by his inner spirit, without an external authority to tell him what and how he might learn. And even if a job spec could be agreed, who was to pay Kepler? The Emperor had given Tycho a handsome salary, which he rarely received, while Kepler, himself, was still being paid as the District Mathematician in Graz. Tycho could help from his own resources for a while, but Kepler did not like being dependent on the former. Furthermore, Tycho was keeping his valued measurements very close to his chest. Kepler did not get immediate and ready access to them, quite contrary to his own approach. He was of the view that scientific discoveries did not belong to anyone in particular, but to the world CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 937 in general. Eventually, he did get the opportunity to take over Longomontanus’ study of the Mars orbit, and so see some of the measurements that Tycho had made. He now knew, at least, what was there and what was lacking. In a letter to Herwart on 12th July 1600, Kepler said “Tycho possesses the best observations and consequently, as it were, the material for the erection of a new structure; he has also workers and everything else which one might desire. He lacks only the architect who uses all this according to plan.”839 Kepler saw himself as that architect. He had been called by God to create a brand new universe, recognizing that it is our mental models that create our reality. At the beginning of April, after a couple of frustrating months, not feeling at home at all, Kepler angrily exploded at a meeting with Tycho to discuss the conditions of their collabora- tion, moderated by Johannes Jessenius, the Wittenburg professor of medicine. The next day, Kepler travelled the 35 kms back to Prague with Jessenius, from where he sent a vitriolic letter to Brahe, as a result of which, neither wanted to have anything to do with the other. But then Kepler fell into deep remorse, wondering how God could have abandoned him.840 What he didn’t realize is that sometimes such conflicts are necessary in evolution’s relentless drive towards Harmony and Wholeness. Eventually, after Kepler had contritely apologized for his behaviour, relationships were patched up and Tycho said that he would do everything in his power to get a suitable contract of employment from the Emperor for two years work assisting with the publication of his writings and measurements, although nothing was put in writing. At this, Kepler, longing for home, left Benatky on 1st June 1600, with Frederick Rosenkrantz,841 Tycho’s third cousin, on his way to Vienna to fight in a war against the Turks.842 However, on arrival back in Graz, Kepler found that his employers no longer regarded him as their District Mathematician and told him that they wanted him to train in medicine in Italy. But before any decisions were made, Kepler was forced to leave Graz four months later, as described on page 935. Given all the problems in Bohemia, he still sought to move back to Tübingen in some capacity, pleading with Mästlin for assistance. If no one was willing to pay him for the work he really wanted to do, maybe he could earn a living in another capacity and work on his magnum opus in his spare time. Furthermore, there were few German speakers in Bohemia and his wife would feel far more at home in Swabia. However, Mästlin was not able to help, and Kepler arrived back in Prague on 19th Octo- ber, in a wretched physical condition and depressed mood. It was a difficult winter as Tycho sought to get support from the Imperial Court for Kepler’s assistance. In the meantime, Ke- pler and his family were totally dependent on Tycho for finances, Kepler working on the Ur- sus pamphlet, as Tycho directed. Then, in the spring of 1601, Kepler learned that his father- in-law had died and he took the long journey back to Graz to try to turn his wife’s property into cash. Even though he was made to feel welcome by the burghers, he was not successful 938 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY in this venture. At which he returned to Prague at the beginning of September 1601.843 A few weeks later, Tycho took Kepler to meet Rudolf and suggested that Kepler could assist Tycho with compiling a superb new set of astronomical tables far more accurate that any the world had ever known. They would be named the Tabulae Rudolphinae ‘Rudolphine Ta- bles’, just as great astronomical tables of the past had borne the names of their royal sponsors. Rudolf was delighted with this idea, and immediately plans were drawn up to give Kepler the job specification and contract of employment he had been seeking for the previous year and a half.844 These Renaissance Men were certainly well aware that they were entering a quite new age. At this meeting with the Emperor, Tycho effectively proposed Kepler as his successor as the Imperial Mathematician. Indeed, this is just what happened a few weeks later, when Ty- cho died. It was a very strange death, described by Kepler in his own hand in Tycho’s papers. On 13th October 1601, Tycho had dinner with Baron Rosenborg, and held his urine longer than was his habit, feeling less concern for the state of his health than for etiquette. On returning home, Brahe could not urinate any more and eleven days later died of uremia in ex- cruciating pain, saying to Kepler, over and over again, “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”845 As Kepler said in The New Astronomy nine years later, Kepler did his utmost to do just that, honouring his debt to Tycho in the development of the three laws of planetary motion.846 In theory, Kepler was now the custodian of Tycho’s instruments and measurements. But they did not belong to the Emperor; they belonged to the Brahe family, for in February 1601, Tycho had applied for citizenship and noble status for himself and his sons, which Rudolf had granted.847 So Tycho’s heirs could inherit his observations and instruments, leading to a tug of war that was to last for over twenty-five years until the Rudolfine Tables were eventually published. For Tengnagel, who Koestler disparagingly called the Junker, was more interested in the fame and fortune that the Brahe family could derive from publication than in Kepler’s highly creative cosmology. He was particularly jealous of any benefit that Kepler, and hence the world, could gain from Brahe’s measurements, demanding that he approved any publications that Kepler made that were based on the observations. To this, Kepler surprisingly agreed. Rudolf offered to buy the instruments and measurements for 20,000 talers, but he was unable to pay more than the interest on this sum. So the Brahe heirs refused to hand them over, the intruments rapidly decaying under lock and key.848 So even in this new capacity, there was plenty of potential for conflict and misunderstanding. Kepler had been employed to publish the Rudolfine Tables, yet what he really wanted to work on was The Harmony of the World. But before he could do either, he had to squeeze the hidden patterns out of Tycho’s observations. Fortunately, Tengnagel and Tycho’s eldest son, also called Tyge, were not in Prague when Tycho died and so Kepler had ready access to the CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 939 measurements. In effect, Kepler hurriedly pinched them, for the benefit of posterity. As he, himself, admitted in a letter in October 1605 to Christopher Heydon, one of his English ad- mirers, “I confess that when Tycho died, I quickly took advantage of the absence, or lack of circumspection, of the heirs, by taking the observations under my care, or perhaps usurping them.”849 This was vital, for there was only one copy of these handwritten measurements, and it was vital that they be protected as much as possible. Kepler’s battle with the ‘Tychonians’, as he disparagingly called Tycho’s heirs,850 was not the only challenge Kepler faced during the next three decades. While Rudolf was most sup- portive, as a patron of the arts and sciences, he was also rather shy and reclusive, quite unable to deal with the political and religious upheavals taking place during the first decade of the new century.851 During the last half of this decade, Rudolf’s brother Matthias took over all his crowns, becoming the Holy Roman Emperor in 1612, after Rudolf’s death. As the Rudolfine Tables had not yet then been written, never mind published, Matthias confirmed Kepler as the court mathematician, agreeing that Kepler could move to Linz as District Mathematician, similar to the position he had held in Graz.852 Kepler was to live in Linz until 1626, in the midst of much religious turmoil. Kepler called Linz a ‘Württemburg colony’ and as such it might have seemed a home from home. However, the Lutheran priest there was suspicious of his Calvinistic leanings and friendliness to the Catholics and refused him communion.853 Tycho had faced a similar situation on Hven in June 1580, when a royal ordinance condemned common-law marriages as evil, such as Tycho’s morganatic marriage with Kirsten. Before Tycho’s parish priest could deny him the sacrament, as directed by the ordinance, Tycho simply stopped going to communion.854 In 1619, following the Bohemian Protestant Rebellion which began the ferocious Thirty Year’s War, Ferdinand succeeded Matthias as the Holy Roman Emperor, confirming Kepler as the Imperial Mathematician on 30th December 1621.855 But he could not stay indefinitely in Linz, which came under siege in 1626. Kepler managed to escape, but then became a refu- gee for the last four years of his life, an outcast from society, having nowhere where he could dedicate himself to his peaceful studies, undisturbed and free of care.856 During these years, he travelled between Regensburg, Ulm, and Sagan in Silesia, modern day Żagań in Poland, where Albrecht Wallenstein, who had bought the Duchy, offered his family a temporary home.857 Kepler’s home life was also not easy, often filled with tragedy. The first two children he had with Barbara— Heinrich and Sussana—died shortly after birth in Graz in 1598 and 1599, respectively. Barbara had three more children in Prague: Susanna, Friedrich, and Ludwig, in 1602, 1604, and 1607, Friedrich, a most promising son, dying in 1611. Only Susanna and Lud- 940 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY wig reached adulthood, got married, and had children, ancestors of people living today. Bar- bara also died in 1611, shortly before Kepler moved to Linz with his two surviving children, his stepdaughter Regina having married three years earlier. But she too died in 1617, aged just 27, leaving three young children, Susanna becoming their foster mother at the age of 15.858 One of Kepler’s top priorities on moving to Linz was to find a mother for his two children. As he candidly wrote in a long letter to an anonymous nobleman dated 23rd October 1613, a week before he was married, he went about the task in a thoroughly systematic manner, listing the qualities of eleven numbered candidates, choosing, not the one who was most socially suitable, but number five, to whom he felt most attracted. As Kepler said, Susanna Reutting- er, as she was called, “had the advantage through her love, and her promise to be modest, thrifty, diligent, and to love her step-children”.859 Susanna, who was seventeen years younger than Kepler, just a year older than his own stepdaughter, had six children while they lived in Linz. Tragically, however, the first three— Margareta Regina, Katharina, and Sebald—died aged 2, 6 months, and 4 in 1617, 1618, and 1623. Four other children were still alive when Kepler died in Regensburg on 15th November 1630. However, his two surviving sons by this marriage—Fridmar and Hildebert—died about 1636, shortly before reaching puberty. Nothing is known about the fate of Anna Maria, born seven months before Kepler’s death. Only Cordula, of the seven children of this marriage, is known to have had children of her own. Susanna, herself, died in 1638, leaving Cordula and Anna Maria, aged 17 and 8 at the time, orphans.860 Kepler thus set out to design a brand new Universe within a world that was at war with itself, very much like the world today, which urgently needs an even greater scientific revolution than the one that Kepler was pivotal in bringing about. Although Copernicus had moved the centre of the known universe from the Earth to the Sun, he still held on to several of the assumptions that Ptolemy had made, as had Tycho. For myself, I find it easiest to understand these assumptions by starting at the end, with the mathematical structure of an ellipse, illustrated in Figure 11.49, whose canonical equation is: 2 2 x y ----- +1----- = 2 2 a b Some basic elliptical parameters are important here. The semi-major and minor axes are denoted by a and b, respectively, and e denotes the distance from a focal point to the centre 2 2 2 2 of the ellipse, where ea= – b . If a and e are known, then ba= – e .The ratio e/a is the eccentricity of the ellipse (ε), a property that all conic sections share. In a circle, ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, the eccentricity is 0, <1, 1, and >1, respectively.861 Today’s mathematical definition of eccentricity is different from the definition at Kepler’s time, which was e, a distance, not a ratio, applied to a circle, not an ellipse. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 941 G

g X M

N L a a b p y r l

Y Z F e C x a S

Figure 11.49: Some basic elliptical parameters To discover that the orbit of a planet is an ellipse, Kepler also investigated the properties of the lunule YXZG, particularly the distance g=a-b. The flattening of the ellipse is today given as f=g/a. He was also concerned with the distance of a planet M, such as Mars, from the Sun at the focal point S, which is most conveniently expressed in polar coordinates as r=l/ (1+εcosθ) relative to a focal point as the pole.862 As rcosθ=acosφ-e, the distance to the Sun can also be expressed as r=a-ecosφ or r=a+ecosφ, depending on whether the focal point is at a positive or negative position relative to the centre.863 A key point in Kepler’s discoveries was also the angle α when M was at point L opposite S, where LS=NF is the semi-latus rectum, l=b2/a. Points Y and Z are called the apsides (plural of apsis), from Greek haptein ‘to join, fasten’, originally applied to felloes, the curved pieces of wood which, joined together, form the circular rim of a wheel supported by spokes, hence also apse ‘arch, vault’. In mathematics, the points Y and Z are called periapsis and apoapsis, from Greek peri- ‘near’ and apo- ‘away from’, equal to a-e and a+e, respectively, with reference to focal point S, and YZ is the apsidal line. In astronomy, the nearest and farthest points of a planet from the Sun are called perihelion and aphelion, from Greek hēlios ‘sun’, so named even before Kepler showed that these orbits are elliptical, not circular. 864 The corresponding terms for the orbits of the Moon and artificial satellites around the Earth are perigee and apogee, from Greek gaia ‘Earth’, which Ptolemy used in his geocentric view of the solar system, as Kepler tells us.865 Now a and b in Figure 11.49 are in the ratio 4:3, so the eccentricity of the ellipse is about 0.66, much larger than the actual eccentricities of the planets, as we know them today, shown 942 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY in Table 11.20. Figure 11.50 shows the elliptical orbits of the six planets that Kepler studied, all but Mercury, and maybe Mars, looking circular. However, in most of these nearly circular orbits, the distance of the Sun to the centre of the ellipse is not insignificant. It was this eccentricity—as a distance—that so troubled astronomers from ancient times, because they believed that the planetary orbits were circular, albeit modified by a host of epicycles.

Planet e/a SC SC SC Mercury 0.206 Venus 0.007 Earth 0.017 Mercury Venus Earth Mars 0.093 Jupiter 0.049 Saturn 0.056 Table 11.20:

Planetary eccentricities SC SC SC

Mars Jupiter Saturn Figure 11.50: Relative distances between Sun and centre of planetary orbits It was this two-thousand-year confusion that Kepler set out to unravel when he first met Tycho in January 1600. He began with the planet Mars, as this has the largest eccentricity of the outer planets. As he explains, he could not use the orbits of Venus and Mercury because Venus could only be observed when low down at night and Mercury very rarely emerges from the Sun’s rays.866 When Kepler began to study Tycho’s measurements of Mars’ orbit, he made a bet with Longomontanus that we would have sorted out the mess within eight days.867 In the event, it took him two and a half years, until October 1602,868 to solve the first part of the problem and another two and a half years, until Easter 1605, to solve the second part.869 By then, he still had not found a mathematical relationship between the speed of a planet and its distance from the Sun, which took another thirteen years to discover, on 15th May 1618, as he tells us precisely.870 Kepler published the results of his inquiries in two tomes, called Astronomia nova ‘New As- tronomy’ and Harmonice mundi ‘The Harmony of the World’ in 1609 and 1619, respectively. In English translation, they are 640 and 500 pages long, not translated into English until 1992 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 943 and 1997, respectively. The first of these books, generally considered Kepler’s magnum opus, had this imposing title: NEW ASTRONOMY BASED UPON CAUSES OR CELESTIAL PHYSICS treated by means of commentaries ON THE MOTIONS OF THE STAR MARS from the observations of THE NOBLE TYCHO BRAHE871 However, The Harmony of the World is the book that was much closer to Kepler’s heart, to his innate sense of harmonious Wholeness, very close to my own. So, for me, this later book, which is still in print in English translation, unlike New Astronomy, was really Kepler’s magnum opus, which I am still exploring. When I began to study the first scientific revolution in the early 1980s, my primary source of information was Arthur Koestler’s idiosyncratic The Sleepwalkers. Koestler followed two leitmotifs in writing this book: (1) the relationship between science and religion, “starting with the undistinguishable unity of the mystic and the savant in the Pythagorean Brother- hood”, (2) “the psychological process of discovery as the most concise manifestation of man’s creative faculty—and in that converse process that blinds him towards truths which, once perceived by a seer, become so heartbreakingly obvious”. He likened this fumbling creative process to that of a sleepwalker, who does not know where she or he is heading. As Koestler said, “The history of cosmic theories … may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias.”872 Much the same situation prevails today. Until we reach the Omega point of evolution, we are all condemned to be schizophrenic sleepwalkers—or perhaps sleeprunners or sleepdrivers would be better words—not knowing that our ultimate destination as individuals and a species is Ineffable, Nondual Conscious- ness. In discovering the first and second laws of planetary motion, Koestler described Kepler’s creative process as “perhaps the most amazing sleepwalking performance in the history of ideas”.873 But this does not mean that Kepler was a “demented dream architect” or a “psycho- path”, as Rhonda Martens874 and James Voelkel875 seem to suggest. Koestler, himself, said, “Kepler was incapable of exposing his ideas methodically, text-book fashion; he had to describe them in the order they came to him, including all the errors, detours, and the traps into which he had fallen. The New Astronomy was written in an unacademic, bubbling baroque style, personal, intimate, and often exasperating.”876 944 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY But Kepler did not blindly choose this style of presentation; he deliberately did so, as Voel- kel has pointed out in The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova, using composition as the structure of both the book and Kepler’s creative process.877 When one looks at Kepler’s description of the first stage of his great adventure, one is first struck by his incredible thoroughness. Being well aware that he was overturning nearly 2,000 years of misguided thinking, he examined a problem that had baffled thinkers during all these years from every possible angle. Following his maxim “There was nothing I could state that I could not also contradict,” he provided a synopsis for the New Astronomy as a binary tree, with every node being a bifurcation, the chapters being the leaves in the tree. Kepler also provided a lengthy introduction, a point-by-point summary of all the chapters, lengthy chapter titles, and an index to explain both in holistic and detailed terms what he was about.878 Kepler compared his presentation process to the journeys of the great explorers. As he said, “in telling of Christopher Columbus, Magellan, and of the Portugese, we do not simply ig- nore the errors by which the first opened up America, the second, the China Sea, and the last, the coast of America; rather we would not wish them omitted, which would indeed be to deprive ourselves of an enormous pleasure in reading.”879 Perhaps Kepler was also aware of what the Greeks called the ‘sin of hubris’. By describing some, but not all the errors he made in his investigations, he could demonstrate his humanity, which has the same root as humility. Another key issue that Kepler had to deal with was that he did not have a clear audience for his revolutionary book because he was unifying mathematical astronomy and causal physics; the mathematicians did not like causality and the qualitative physicists were not particularly skilled in mathematics. Realizing that not even the intellectuals and academics could readily understand his process of reasoning, he tells us in the first paragraph of the introduction why he does not use the formal procedure of Euclidean geometry in presenting his treatise. For, as he says, “I myself, who am known as a mathematician, find my mental forces wearying when … rereading my own work.” So “there are very few suitably prepared readers these days: the rest generally reject such works. How many mathematicians are there who put up with the trouble of working through the Conics of Apollonious of Perga?”880 Very much the same can be said about the revolution in science that we are engaged in today. Only, we are not just changing circles into ellipses and putting the motive power of the solar system in the Sun, as Kepler did. We are turning the whole of Western thought upside down, revealing that the motive power of the Universe lies at the centre of the radiant light of Consciousness, which has been occluded for thousand of years, but most especially since the first scientific revolution. Kepler was also fully aware of the psychological implications of his treatise, the 25-page introduction being especially revealing in this respect. For instance, he went out of his way to disarm professors of the physical sciences, who he expected to be irate with him.881 He spe- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 945 cifically addressed as many of the objections that he could foresee from his questioning of deeply entrenched belief systems. Regarding possible scriptural objections to a moving earth, Kepler appealed to commonsense, pointing out that the psalms, for instance, are intended to be taken figuratively, not literally.882 As he says, addressing the pious, “while in theology it is authority that carries the most weight, in philosophy it is reason.” Being fully aware that he was thinking in a quite different way from his contemporaries, he asked those who could not assimilate what he was writing in these words, which William H. Donahue, the English translator, calls “Advice for idiots”:883 But whoever is too stupid to understand astronomical science, or too weak to believe Copernicus without affecting his faith, I would advise him that, having dismissed astronomical studies and having damned whatever philosophical opinions he pleases, he mind his own business and betake himself home to scratch in his own dirt patch, abandoning this wandering about the world. So as is the way with so many evolutionary pioneers, Kepler was far ahead of his time, not only with his discoveries, but also in his whole manner of thought. As Koestler tells us, “He received no help, no encouragement; he had patrons and well-wishers, but no congenial spirit.”884 Even, today, his thought processes are not easily digestible, even with modern translations and several scholarly commentaries being written. So there is still much that I do not fully understand about Kepler’s extraordinary adventure, not having a very strong spatial intelligence and not having the energy to dive too deeply into the classical and Medieval mind- sets. Nevertheless, let us focus attention a little on the way Kepler dismantled the long-held structures necessary to build a quite new universe. In Part I of New Astronomy, Kepler laid down what he called the ‘ground plan’ (Latin ty- pus) for the entire work. He wanted to begin with a level playing field, and so treated all three hypotheses—Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Brahean—equally, questioning the various assumptions that they all shared in common. The first of these was that Brahe, in common with Ptolemy and Copernicus, performed his calculations on a planet in relationship to the mean motion of the sun, while Kepler had stated in Mysterium cosomographicum—written before he had heard of Brahe—that for physical reasons such calculations should be measured by the actual (Latin apparente) motion of the sun. Accordingly, Kepler first used Brahe’s relatively accurate measurements to show the equiv- alence of the three hypotheses. Although the three models are conceptually quite different, all produce results that “are for practical purposes equivalent within a hair’s breadth”, Kepler noted.885 Each model worked to within a reasonable margin of error, predicting planetary positions based on past observations, at least for a few years into the future. So mathematics, alone, could not determine the correct semantic model, a similar point being made by David Bohm when he set out on his career in physics in 1939, as we saw on page 81 in Chapter 1, ‘Starting Afresh at the Very Beginning’. 946 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY

Figure 11.51: The actual path that the Ptolemaic theory causes Mars to travel Kepler, furthermore showed the absurdity of Ptolemy’s epicycles with the diagram in Fig- ure 11.51, showing the actual path of Mars in relationship to a stationary Earth at point A.886 As Kepler noted, space B was simply not big enough to accommodate the motion of Mars, never mind those of the Sun, Venus, and Mercury. As William Donahue pointed out in the introduction to his translation of Astronomia Nova “The appearance of this diagram is a dramatic moment in the history of thought. Nothing like it had ever been published before.”887 With this sound foundation, in the first half of Part II, Kepler then sets out on his war with Mars “in imitation of the ancients”, Mars being, of course, the god of war.888 His first task was to correct the observations that Brahe had made to make allowance for the refraction of light through the atmosphere, a subject that he had studied in Astronomiæ pars optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy), known as the Optics, published in 1603. Making these corrections illustrates Kepler’s high level of diligence, for it took him over a year to make them. As he said, seeking sympathy from the reader, “If this wearisome method has filled you with loath- ing, it should more properly fill you with compassion for me, as I have gone through it at least seventy times.”889 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 947 In making these corrections, Kepler also showed that another assumption that Ptolemy had made was false. The plane of the Martian orbit does not oscillate with respect to that of the Earth, but remains constant at 1° 50' .890 Kepler’s corrected observations consisted of a table of twelve acronychal positions of Mars from 1580 to 1604, the last two Kepler himself having made. Acronychal derives from Greek akronuchos ‘at nightfall’, from akros ‘tip, point’ and nux ‘night’, incorrectly spelt achronical, as if from Greek kronos ‘time’. So these measurements were made at sunset, when Mars was in opposition to the Sun. With this table of twelve observations, Kepler then set out to test another of Ptolemy’s assumptions. Although it was clear that the planets moved at different speeds and distances from the Sun, Ptolemy assumed that there is a point E, called the E3 equant (punctum equans), the point at which the S E planet completes equal angles in equal times, as Ke- 2 pler clearly defines equant. In other words, from the E M 1 point of view of the equant, “the velocity of the planet would appear to be uniform.”891 Ptolemy further assumed that the centre of the circular orbit was midway between the Earth, in Ptolemy’s case, and the equant. Figure 11.52: Calculating Earth’s orbit Kepler decided to test for the existence of an equant in his heliocentric model, without making the assumption that EC=CS, as illustrated in Figure 11.53. So he placed E at an arbitrary point on the apsidal line.892 The consequences of what Kepler called his ‘vicarious model’ or ‘vicarious hypothesis’ were far reaching, for he showed “either Mars didn’t have uniform motion around an equant point or Mars’s orbit was not circular”.893 The reason for this incompatibility arose from the accuracy of Brahe’s observations, which led to a discrepancy of eight minutes of arc in Kepler’s calculations. This was something that Kepler could not accept. As he said, “Since the divine benevolence has vouch- safed us Tycho Brahe, a most diligent observer, from whose observations 8' error in this Ptole- maic computation is shown, it is fitting that we with thankful mind both acknowledge and honour this benefit of God.”894 At this, Kepler abandoned his attempt to fit in with the mathematical approach of the ancients, and set out to develop a ‘deeper astronomy’, based on the physical causes of the motions [of the planets].895 As he said, why should the equant, as a mathematical construct, have any influence on how the planets behaved? 948 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY The first step he needed to take on this liberating journey was to show that the orbit of the Earth behaved in exactly the same way as all the other planets. But how could he do this? If the Earth is moving around the Sun as a planet, how could he establish a stable point from which to study Earth’s orbit? Well, he realized that the acronychal points of Mars’ orbit gave him a stable point from which to view the Earth. He was able to stand outside his egoic sense of self and view the solar system as if he were a Martian. Einstein called Kepler’s approach here an “an idea of true genius”.896 Actually, from a point of view of trigonometry, the calculation is quite simple, albeit rather tedious. Figure 11.52 illustrates the basic principles. As Mars crosses the Earth’s apsidal line every 687 Earth days, the line MS is effectively fixed in relationship to the Zodiac. Taking three reliable such PA measurements, Kepler found the Earth’s position S C E relative to Mars and the Sun, determining the relationships of lines ME and SE to the Zodiac for any position of the Earth. So, as he was still thinking in terms of circular orbits, and as three points uniquely determine a circle, he could use a diagram like Figure 11.52 to calculate three unique Figure 11.53: Kepler’s equant hypothesis positions of the Earth, relative to the Sun and Mars.897 Kepler was thus able to refute another of Copernicus’s basic assumptions: The Earth does not move uniformly in a circle, but behaves just like Mars and the other planets. Furthermore, he found “The speed of the Earth at aphelion and perihelion was inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun,” known as his ‘distance rule’, beginning to come close to the modern concept of gravity,898 which he likened to magnetism. For the Englishman William Gilbert had discovered in 1600 that the Earth is a big magnet.899 It was at this critical point that Ke- pler began to unify mathematical astronomy with causal physics, saying, “Physicists, prick up your ears! For here is raised a deliberation involving an inroad to be made into your province.”900 Of course, these ideas were pretty fuzzy at first, as is the way with the evolution of the mind. Nevertheless, the title of Chapter 33 clearly states the central issue: ‘The power that moves the planets resides in the body of the Sun’, power here being virtus ‘manliness, excel- lence, capacity, worth, virtue, courage’. Actually, Kepler called this power species, from specio ‘to see, observe’, which could mean ‘appearance’, ‘surface’, ‘form’, ‘semblance’, ‘mental image’, ‘sort’, ‘nature’, or ‘archetype’, among many diverse senses, the Latin equivalent of the Greek eidos, Plato’s word for ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’. Being dissatisfied with the various translations CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 949 of species, Donahue left this word untranslated in his translation of Astronomia Nova.901 This seems quite appropriate, for while there are many species of causal power, they all emanate from structure, as we see in Chapter 5, ‘An Integral Science of Causality’ on page 483. Needless to say, Kepler did not know this and neither do most scientists working today. So in the following few chapters of New Astronomy, Kepler speculated about the nature of this power, thinking of the Sun as a magnet rotating around its own axis, thus carrying the planets with it, like the ends of the spokes of a wheel. However, as the planets do not all complete their revolutions in the same period, Kepler thought that this was because of the laziness or ‘inertia’ of the planets, which desire to remain in the same place, resisting the sweeping force.902 Refreshed by what Koestler calls Kepler’s excursion into the Himmelsphysik,903 in the final chapter of Part III, Kepler returned to mathematics and sought a way of calculating the relationship of the speed of a planet to its distance from the Sun. To do this, he adapted the method that Archimedes had used to calculate the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter: by dividing the circle into an infinity of isosceles triangles. In a similar fashion, not having the infinitesimal calculus available to him, Kepler drew spokes from the Sun to the orbiting Mars at 1° angles, like Fig- ure 11.54, where the angles are 15°, performing 180 Figure 11.54: Kepler’s Archimedean calculations, as the ellipse is symmetrical around the triangluation apsidal line.904 In this rather dubious manner, of whose weakness Ke- pler was well aware, he discovered that the area ‘swept out’ by a straight line from an orbiting planet to a Sun would sweep out equal areas in equal time, which has come to be called Ke- pler’s second law of planetary motion because it makes more sense in relationship to an ellipse than a circle, which Kepler was still working with at the time. He immediately realized that his ‘area rule’, depicted in Figure 11.55 was not the same as his ‘distance rule’, further work being needed to explore this relationship.905 950 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY This he set out to do in the first four chapters of Part IV, exploring the application of his area rule to Mars’ orbit, which threw up another 8' error, indicating, “either the circular orbit was wrong or the area rule was wrong. Maybe both.”906 He was thus led, in the first instance, to see, “the orbit of the planet is not a circle, but is of oval shape.”907 Koestler describes this as “a wild, frightening new departure”. For it is one thing to mock the slavish imitators of Aristotle, but quite another “to assign Figure 11.55: Illustration of Kepler’s first and second laws of planetary motion an entirely new, lopsided, implausible path for the heavenly bodies”.908 For there is not one oval, but many of them, oval deriving from Latin ovum ‘egg’, from a PIE-base *ōwyo-‘egg’, the root of egg, possibly derived from *awi- ‘bird’, the root of aviary and ostrich. And like a chicken’s egg, an oval is not necessarily symmetrical around the perpendicular at the centre of the apsidal line; it could be flattened at the periapsis. Kepler then embarked on a wild search for a mathematical explanation for a planet’s orbit. Of course, an ellipse would have been a suitable solution, but as he wrote to his friend David Fabricus, “if the orbit were a perfect ellipse the problem he had been struggling with would have been solved long ago by Archimedes or Apollonius.”909 Kepler did consider an ellipse, but only as an approximation for the ‘true’ orbit of a planet. The first breakthrough seems to have come about as the result of a coincidence. After years of tossing the various measurements of Mars’ orbit around in his mind, the figure of 429 as the breadth of the lunule in Figure 11.49 on page 942 was uppermost. This is a measurement of f, the flattening of the ellipse, because Kepler took the length of the semi-major axis (a) to be 100,000, 0.00429 in modern decimal terms. Now he also explored the value of α, the angle subtended by Mars between the Sun and the centre of the orbit. He found the maximum value to be 5° 18' at the latum rectum point relative to the Sun, calculating its secant as 100,429, actually 1.00429. For Kepler, this could not just be a coincidence. As he said, “it was as if I were awakened from sleep to see a new light.”910 He thought that he could see a mathematical relationship between α and the distance to the Sun. However, it was a false dawn, even for Arthur Koestler, who said that this relationship “specifically defined the orbit as an ellipse”, giving as evidence the formula r=1+ecosφ, where φ is the longitude referred to the centre of the orbit, putting S at F.911 It does not. Using modern measurements for Mars’ orbit, α at L is 5° 22', secα=1.00442, and f=0.00436, a close relationship that does not hold in general. For in algebraic terms, when M is at L:. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 951

2 2 4 2 2 4 p e + l a – + b secα ====cscψ ------a b b ≠ 1 + f =2 – -- 2 r l b a So inevitably, Kepler was sent off on another wild goose chase, struggling to make sense of an orbit he called via buccosa ‘puffy-cheeked’, from bucca ‘cheek’, especially when puffed out.912 Eventually, trying a quite different approach, Kepler realized that all his calculations pointed to only one conclusion: “no figure is left for the planet to follow other than a perfectly elliptical one.” “O ridiculous me!” he exclaimed,913 having spent six tortuous years searching for what by then was so simple and obvious. But Kepler did not stop there. It is typical of his utmost thoroughness that he wrote a Part V, describing the way his model applied to latitudes, Parts II to IV having been focused on longitudes. So as Voelkel says, Part I and V form the prologue and epilogue for the entire work, once again demonstrating how carefully crafted it had been. Having completed the writing of New Astronomy, Kepler then had the tricky task of getting it published. As we saw on page 939, he needed the permission of Brahe’s son-in-law Tengnagel, who had converted to Catholicism and become ‘His Imperial Majesty’s Council- lor’. In the end, Tengnagel agreed to the publication, but only if he could write a foreword, which contained these words: “I thought I should give you just three words’ warning, lest you be moved by anything of Kepler’s, but especially his liberty in disagreeing with Brahe in physical arguments, groundlessly complicating the work on the Rudolphine Tables, and familiar to all philosophers from the creation of the universe to the present.”914 As Koestler splendidly put it, “If Osiander’s preface to the Book of Revolutions [see page 916] displayed the wisdom of a gentle snake, in Tengnagel’s preface to the New Astronomy, we hear the braying of a pompous ass echoing down the centuries.”915 Kepler should then have returned to the publication of the Rudolphine Tables, as he was required to do by his contract of employment. But he was too distracted by other matters, not the least the death of Barbara, his first wife, his marriage to Susanna, his second one, and his mother’s witch trial to do so. Rather, he worked on his longest book, the Epitome Astro- nomia Copernicanæ, for “he wanted to make the shape he had given astronomy suitable for ‘school benches of the lower classes’.”916 Having written the first three volumes of Epitome, he worked on “producing and immediate money-maker, an Ephemeris for 1618”.917 Then between September 1617 and February 1618, Barbara’s first daughter and Susanna’s first two died. “Kepler was too distracted with grief to concentrate on the tedious calculations required for the Rudolphine Tables. ‘Since the Tables require peace,’ he wrote, ‘I have abandoned them and turned my mind to developing the Harmony,’ ”918 his first love. Much of The Harmony of the World seems to have been written at Graz, before Kepler met Brahe. It is written in a more traditional mathematical manner with definitions, axioms, and 952 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY propositions, showing how Kepler, in his innate innocence, approached mathematics and music from first principles. Harmony is written in five books, which Kepler labels I, GEOMET- RIC; II, ARCHITECTONIC, coming from the GEOMETRY OF FIGURES; III, HARMONIC; IV, METAPHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, and ASTROLOGICAL; and V, ASTRONOMICAL and MET- APHYSICAL.919 In the second definition of Book I, titled ‘Construction of Regular Figures’, Kepler states that a pentagram or ‘star pentagon’ “is an augmented figure, constructed by producing pairs of non-neighbouring sides”,920 a perspective that seems to have escaped Euclid.921 Kepler then introduces the concept of ‘knowability’, divisions of the circle that form polygons that can be constructed with a ruler and compass, noting particularly that a heptagon cannot be so formed and so is not ‘knowable’ 1 Book II, titled ‘On the Congruence of Harmonic Fig- 7 6 ures’, provides original insights into pure mathematics, 1 5 exploring a wide variety of plane tessellations as two-di- 5 mensional analogues of three-dimensional solids that 1 6 11 4 form ‘congruences’, as mentioned on page 136 in 1 4 Chapter 1, ‘Starting Afresh at the Very Beginning’. In 3 5 9 this way, he codified the thirteen Archimedean solids for the first time, and discovered the small and great 3 7 1 4 stella dodecahedra, depicted in Figure 11.16 on 2 page 848, by extending the faces around a face as far as 2 1 7 possible, in a similar manner to the pentagram. 5 3 1 2 11 In the first two chapters of Book III, titled ‘On the Or- 3 8 1 3 igin of the Harmonic Proportions, and on the Nature 2 Same 5 and Differences of Those Things which are concerned 5 8 13 with Melody’, Kepler explored the relationship between Figure 11.56: Kepler’s harmonic ratios the constructible or knowable divisions of a circle and the corresponding harmonious divisions of a string, when plucked. He found just seven such divisions 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, 1:5, 1:6, 2:5, and 3:8, together with their complements, 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:6, 3:5, and 5:8, which Kepler arranged in a hierarchy shown in Figure 11.56.922 So as well as the octave, perfect fifth and fourth, which the Pythagoreans discovered, Kepler added minor third (5:6), major third (4:5), minor sixth (5:8), and major sixth (3:5) to what is now called ‘just intonation’, as shown in Table 11.16 on page 905. In the remaining fourteen chapters of Book III, Kepler then went on to explore in some detail the musical intervals and modes that feel melodious to us human beings. Book IV seems to have a psychological flavour to it, as Kepler explored the relationships of harmonies to the faculties of the soul (animae facultates). Referring to Proclus, Kepler said, CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 953 “the patterns of mathematical things (and so also of harmonies, and much more so) were in the mind intellectually [Greek noeros], but in the soul vitally [Greek zotikos].”923 He then “applies his harmonic ratios to every subject under the sun: metaphysics and epistemology, politics, psychology, and physiognomics; architecture and poetry, meteorology and astrology”,924 as Koestler summarizes it. Book V ‘On the Most Perfect Harmony of the Heavenly Motions’ begins with his fasci- nation with the ‘five regular solid figures’, and their relationships to each other. In Chapter III ‘Summary of Astronomical Theory, Necessary for the Study of the Heavenly Harmonies’, he didn’t completely let go of the idea of nested polyhedra as matching the orbits of the planets,925 even though the accurate calculations of New Astronomy had show such a model could not be applied a priori. Nevertheless, in the very same chapter, Kepler discovered what he had been looking for for twenty years: a mathematical relationship between the speed of a planet and its distance from the Sun, today known as Kepler’s third law of planetary motion. This is how he expressed this law in Latin: “quod proportio, quae est inter binorum quorum- cunque planetarum tempora periodica, sit praecise sesquialtera proportionis mediarum distantiar- um, id est orbium ipsorum’, translated into English as “the proportion between the periodic times of any two planets is precisely the sesquialterate proportion of their mean distance, that is, of the actual spheres.”926 He then explained that what he meant by ‘sesquialterate proportion’—a ratio of 3:2—refers to powers rather than direct ratios, mathematically expressed as: P 2 R 3 ⎛⎞-----a = ⎛⎞-----a ⎝⎠ ⎝⎠ Pb Rb

where Px is the orbital period of a planet and Rx is the average distance of a planet from the 2 3 Sun, the semi-major axis of the ellipse. In other words, Px ⁄ Rx is a constant equal to 2.97472505×10−19 s2m−3 in units of years and metres.927 954 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY After twenty arduous years searching, Kepler had, at long last, found the harmony of the heavens in a manner that he felt quite consistent with his inner sense of harmony, which he felt in mathematics and music, in particular. Here are the laws as they are known today, which Newton diligently found buried in Kepler’s discursive publications. 1. All planets move about the Sun in elliptical orbits, having the Sun as one of the foci. 2. A radius vector joining any planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal lengths of time. 3. The squares of the sidereal periods (of revolution) of the planets are directly proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the Sun.928 There was then just one thing remaining: to complete and publish the Rudolfine Tables. He was greatly helped in this process by John Napier’s logarithms, which he Figure 11.57: Frontispiece to Rudolfine Tables had discovered in 1617, writing his own book on this elegant way of transforming multiplication and division into addition and sub- traction in the winter of 1621-22. Eventually, in 1624, the Tables were ready for publication, being printed in Ulm three years later. They duly honoured Tycho Brahe, as Figure 11.57 depicts, bearing a resemblance of the ceiling at Stjerneborg, when Queen Sophie visited Hven in 1586, as described on page 922. For in a similar manner, Tycho is surrounded by some of the great astronomers, pointing at the ceiling of the Greek temple, asking his predecessors Quid si sic? ‘Is this it?’ Kepler, himself, is forlornly portrayed on the base at his desk, where a few coins dropped by the Imperial Eagle land.929 Galileo, seven years Kepler’s senior, did not discover the laws of celestial motion in Ke- pler’s writings, perhaps because he had first been introduced to Kepler’s work in 1597 through the Mysterium, with its fanciful, mystical overtones.930 He was born in Pisa and was not particularly interested in the Copernican system during the early years of his career. His father CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 955 wanted him to study medicine, but he became enamoured with mathematics, discovering in 1582, in his second year at university, that a pendulum of given length swings at a constant frequency, regardless of amplitude.931 Although Galileo did not graduate, he obtained the chair of mathematics at Pisa in 1589 at the age of twenty-five, having been turned down by Bologna, the oldest university in Europe, the previous year. “There, according to his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), Galileo demonstrated, by dropping bodies of different weights from the top of the famous Leaning Tower, that the speed of fall of a heavy object is not proportional to its weight, as Aristotle had claimed.” However, it was his opponent Giorgio Coressio who carried out this experiment, in an attempt to confirm the Aristotelian view that larger bodies must fall quicker than smaller ones.932 Galileo’s ideas upset the Aristotelians at the University and his contract was not renewed; he moved to Padua in 1592, and stayed there until 1610, the most creative and fertile years of his life.933 In Padua, the second oldest university in Italy, he determined that the distance fallen by a body is proportional to the square of the elapsed time (the law of falling bodies) and that the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola, not a pair of straight lines, as Aristotle claimed.934 These discoveries were to lead to the foundations of the science of dynamics, but were only published towards the end of his life. Galileo’s magnum opus Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, which “was to be the genesis of modern physics”,935 was only written and published in 1638, when Galileo was seventy-four and under house arrest following his trial by the Inquisition.936 In the event, it was Galileo’s work with the telescope that was first to make him famous and later infamous. He did not invent the most important investigative tool in astronomy. Three Dutch lens makers, Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen, and Jacob Metius, are credited with this invention in 1608.937 Neither was he the first to draw a map of the Moon’s surface. In the summer of 1609, Thomas Harriot in England made telescopic observations of the moon, and drew maps of the lunar surface,938 which are reputed to be better than those that Galileo drew.939 Galileo also did not coin the word telescope. The Greek mathematician Gio- vanni Demisiani coined telescope in 1611 from Greek teleskopos ‘far-seeing’ from tele ‘far’ and skopein ‘to look or see’.940 In Sidereus Nuncius (The Message from the Stars or Starry Messenger), published in 1610, Galileo had used the term perspicillum, from Latin perspicere ‘to see through’ and –illum, an instrumental suffix. What set Galileo apart from his contemporaries was that he quickly figured out how to improve the instrument, teaching himself the art of lens grinding, and producing increasingly powerful telescopes, at a magnitude of twenty times by the autumn of 1609.941 With this instrument, he discovered four moons circling Jupiter and that there are far more stars in the sky than can be observed with the naked eye, which he announced in Starry Messenger, his first scientific publication. Unlike Kepler’s New Astronomy, this booklet was short and to the 956 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY point, capable of being read in an hour, unlike Kepler’s magnum opus, which could take ‘nearly a lifetime’ to digest, as one of his colleagues ruefully commented. Being written in a tersely factual style that no scholar had employed before, Starry Messenger immediately made a great impact,942 casting further doubt on traditional views of the heavens, even though written in Latin rather than Italian, as were Galileo’s later writings.943 One reason for the great controversy stirred up by Starry Messenger was Galileo’s “rare gift of provoking enmity”, unlike Copernicus, who was an invisible man throughout his life, and the disarming Kepler, who no one could seriously dislike.944 Although Kepler and Galileo were the two foremost scientists in Europe, they could not be more dissimilar, both in temperament and in their professional approach. Kepler spent his life seeking a Pythagorean cosmology, unifying mysticism and science, firmly rooted in “the rich mystic sap of the Middle Ages”, while Galileo was “a second-generation rebel against authority”.945 Their correspondence was distinctly one-sided. Kepler was constantly writing to Galileo, asking him for comments on his papers, which Galileo never did, writing to Kepler only twice, in 1597 and 1610, when further correspondence ceased. Galileo rarely mentions Kepler in his writings, ignoring the three laws of planetary motion, defending to the end of his life that circles and epicycles are the only conceivable form of heavenly motion.946 This is especially surprising given Galileo’s reputation as a mathematical scientist. Yet Kepler was the first to confirm Galileo’s sightings of the moons of Jupiter, when Galileo’s Italian colleagues refused to belief him, which Kepler published in a short pamphlet called Observation-Report on Jupiter’s Four Wandering Satellites, “the first appearance in history of the term satellite, which Kepler had coined in a previous letter to Galileo”.947 This brings us to the furore surrounding Galileo’s promotion of the Copernican heliocentric system. In Galileo’s first letter to Kepler, as a rare acknowledgement for receiving the Cos- mic Mystery, Galileo claimed to have “adopted the teachings of Copernicus many years ago,” that is in his twenties. Yet, Galileo went on to say, “I have not dared to bring [the arguments for Copernicanism] into public light, frightened by the fate of Copernicus himself, … to an infinite multitude of others (for such is the number of fools) an object of ridicule and deri- sion”.948 So like Copernicus, it was not the Christian Church that Galileo feared. Indeed, he had no reason to do so. As Koestler tells us, “discussion of the Copernican system was not only permitted, but encouraged by [the leading astronomers among the Jesuits]—under one proviso, that it should be confined to the language of science, and should not impinge on theological matters.”949 Rather, the fiercest opposition to the Copernican system came from the Aristotelians at the Universities, who, as Galileo tells us, seem to have been “nourished from childhood on the opinion that philosophizing is and can be nothing but to make a comprehensive survey of the texts of Aristotle”, whose pages could provide a solution to any proposed problem, as CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 957 if the great book of the universe had been written to be read by nobody but Aristotle.950 So even when it was discovered that Venus too has phases, like the Moon, and that the Sun has sunspots, showing that it too is subject to generation and decay, the Catholics did not de- mure. Even Pope Paul V received Galileo in friendly audience in Rome in 1610,951 shortly before Galileo was appointed mathematician and philosopher of the grand duke of Tuscany in Florence, where the Galilei family had lived for generations and where he had spent his childhood.952 This cosy situation changed as the result of a banal incident in 1613, which sparked off ‘the greatest scandal in Christendom’. It concerned an after-dinner conversation at the table of Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, attended by Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine monk and Professor of Mathematics at Pisa, and Cosimo Boscaglia, a professor of philosophy. In the course of conversation at the dinner about the celestial discoveries then being made, Boscaglia argued that the motion of the Earth could not be true, being contrary to the Bi- 953 ble. Then after dinner, the Duke’s mother, the Dowager Duchess 11.58: Galileo’s nemesis Christina of Lorraine, “who seems to have conformed to the idea of a bossy, talkative, and scatterbrained Dowager,” portrayed in Figure 11.58, wanted to know what Castelli thought about the matter. Castelli, putting his theological hat on, rather than his mathematical one, convinced everyone except the Duchess and Boscaglia, who remained silent, that the movement of the Earth did not contradict the scriptures.954 Castelli, Galileo’s favourite pupil and founder of modern hydrodynamics, wrote to Galileo about the conversation and the Duchess’s theological opposition to the Copernican worldview. Galileo was at once up in arms, writing an open letter to Castelli intending to silence all theological objections to Copernicus, expanding his arguments in a letter to the Duchess the following year, addressing her as “The Most Serene Grand Duchess Mother”,955 until then a good friend of Galileo.956 As Koestler describes it in his inimitable way, this second letter, being widely circulated, “was a kind of theological atom bomb, whose radioactive fall- out is still being felt”.957 We are still living with the deep schism between science and religion that this after-dinner conversation opened up and which this book is endeavouring to reconcile. Until this time, the higher echelons of the Church, including the Pope and the Cardi- nals, many of whom were Galileo’s friends, had a deep respect for the discoveries being made by the scientists. The central problem lay not in what Galileo said, but in his abrasive personality, seeking to win arguments, not through sound scientific reasoning, but by ridiculing his opponents and through his brilliant polemics in defence of the freedom of thought. As a result, the effect of his letters to Castelli and Duchess Christina was exactly the opposite from that intended. 958 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY They were very deviously written, tinged with sophistry, evasion, and plain dishonesty. Gal- ileo attempted to give the impression that the Copernican system was more than a hypothesis, that it was rigorously proven, shifting the burden of proof on to the theologians; it was their task to disprove it, not his to prove it. This was suicidal, because Galileo, incapable of acknowledging that any of his contemporaries had a share in the progress of astronomy, was ignorant of Kepler’s first two laws of planetary motion, which went a very long way to establishing the mathematical foundations of the theory.958 Furthermore, Galileo ventured into areas of theology and scripture in a way that felt threatening to the backwoodsmen in the lower echelons of the Church. Regarding theology, Galileo said that theology could not claim to be queen of all the sciences through better methods and profounder learning because the findings of geometry, astronomy, music, and medicine are more excellently contained in the books of Archimedes, Ptolemy, Boethius, and Galen than they are in the Bible, as theologians having skills in the other sciences would agree. However, theology could claim to be queen because it “is conversant with the loftiest divine contemplation, and occupies the regal throne among the sciences by this dignity.”959 Today, we can say that mysticism is the queen of the sciences, which both the dogmatic theologians and materialistic scientists are vehemently opposed to. But Galileo went even further. He said that the scriptures in the Bible could be abstruse, having literal, surface meanings, which could also be interpreted much more profoundly. But in expressing such sentiments, Galileo was challenging the absolute authority of the Church to interpret the Bible. This particularly upset two Dominican monks, Niccolo Lorini, professor of ecclesiastical history, and Thommaso Caccini, “who beautifully fits the satirist’s image of an ignorant, officious, lying and intriguing monk of the Renaissance,” who accused Galileo of heresy, punishable by death. Lorini arranged for the Castelli letter to be copied and sent to the Consultor of the Holy Office. This letter contained two deliberate errors in transcription. Scriptures “taken in the strict literal meaning, look as if they differed from the truth”, became “… which are false in the literal meaning”, and ‘overshadows’ became ‘perverts’, in the original: “Scripture sometimes overshadows its own meaning.”960 The charge of heresy against Galileo was formally dismissed in November 1615. However, during the year that it was being considered, Cardinal Robert Bellardine, a contemplative and “the most respective theologian in Christendom”, one of whose functions was that of ‘Master of Controversial Questions’, ordered a compromise. He stated that while it was admissible to expound the Copernican system as a hypothesis superior to Ptolemy’s, the burden of proof for the heliocentric view must be placed on the advocates of the system. However, rather than letting the matter rest and moving on to more fertile inquiries, Galileo refused to accept such a compromise. For to do so, he would disclose to the world that he had no proof, and would be laughed out of court, an abject humiliation for the foremost scholar of his day, as Galileo CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 959 saw himself. So he pretended that he had proof, but refused to present it because to do so would be a waste of time because “those Peripatetics who must be convinced show themselves incapable of following even the simplest and easiest of argument.”961 Such contemptuous ar- rogance is even the more ridiculous because Galileo, himself, did not understand Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. What happened next is even more amazing from a scientific perspective. In the Astronoma Nova published six years earlier, Kepler had correctly explained the tides as an effect of the moon’s attraction. But Galileo dismissed Kepler’s theory as an astrological superstition, declaring that the tides were a direct consequence of the Earth’s combined motions, which cause the sea to move at a different speed from the land. Very foolishly, Galileo then used his erroneous theory of the tides as conclusive physical proof of the Copernican system, setting out to make a direct assault on the Pope.962 As a result, on 23rd February 1616, the Qualifiers of the Holy Office (theological experts) declared it to be heretical to declare to be true the proposition that “The sun is the centre of the world and wholly immovable of local motion.” They also said that to declare that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the world is at least erroneous in faith. But this verdict was not made public at the time. Rather, the General Congregation of the Index, under pressure from more enlightened Cardinals, issued a more moderate decree on 5th March 1616, in which the fatal word heresy does not appear. The decree, which was not confirmed by papal declaration ex cathedra and so did not become infallible dogma, nevertheless said that the Co- pernican system “is false and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture”.963 The decree put two books on the Index, but with an important distinction. Copernicus’ book Revolutions was “suspended until it be corrected”, which it was four years later. The ob- jection was Copernicus’ representation of the heliocentric system as certain rather than hypo- thetical. The other book that was banned was one by Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite monk, published the previous year. This was “altogether prohibited and condemned” because the book attempted to show that the Copernican doctrine is “consonant with truth and not opposed to Holy Scripture”. So it was still acceptable for astronomers to compute the course of the planets as if they were moving around the Sun, provided that they spoke hypothetically and did not mention the Bible.964 The compromise that Bellardine had ordered thus became official policy. The decree did not mention Galileo by name or ban any of his publications, limited as they were at that time. However, Bellardine served an injunction on Galileo, the exact word- ing of which is uncertain, for there are three documents bearing on the point in the archives. Two of them indicate that Galileo had acquiesced to the order not to promote the Coperni- can system because this “is contrary to Holy Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held”. There is no injunction in these documents not to discuss the Copernican theory. How- 960 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY ever, in the third document, Galileo was commanded “to abstain altogether from teaching or defending [the Copernican doctrine] and even from discussing it; and if he do not acquiesce therein, that he is to be imprisoned”. Galileo was thus effectively muzzled on the Copernican issue until 1623, when his friend Maffeo Barberini was made Pope Urban VIII. The following year, Galileo had six long audi- ences with the new Pope, who refused to revoke the earlier decree, but gave permission for Galileo to write about Copernicus provided he did so hypothetically and avoided theological arguments. For, as Urban suggested, phenomena produced by all-powerful God could be explained by more than one hypothesis and it is beyond the human mind to say which of them might be true. Galileo therefore set out to use his faulty theory of the tides to write a new book, which became known as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican at Urban’s suggestion. The Dialogue is carried out by three characters, Salviati, Galileo’s mouthpiece, Simplicio, defending Aristotle and Ptolemy, and Sagredo, supporting Salviati under the guise of neutral- ity. As a scientific treatise, it leaves much to be desired. While Galileo was writing for a lay audience in Italian, his account was not so much a simplification of Copernicus, but a distortion of the facts; not popular science, but misleading propaganda. As Giorgio de Santillana, a twentieth-century biographer and translator said, while a drastic simplification may have been an easy didactic device, he nevertheless committed the capital error “of constructing theories in defiance of the best results of observation”.965 As the Time review of The Crime of Galileo by de Santillana said, the image of Galileo as a martyr of thought recanting before the Italian Inquisition is out of focus. “It has been distorted by three centuries of rationalist prejudice and clerical polemics.”966 Needless to say, through the words of Simplicio, Galileo used his weak scientific reasoning to mock the beliefs of the Christian Church and the Aristotelians, hardly conducive to making friends and influencing people. Furthermore, he incurred the wrath of the Pope by the devious way that he endeavoured to get the work through the censors. In January 1630, when the book was completed, Niccolo Riccardi was the Chief Censor in Rome, who, knowing the Pope’s favourable disposition, did his best to expedite the editing process. Under pressure from influential parties, including the Papal Secretary, Riccardi granted the imprimatur in advance, on condition that he would revise it himself, page by page before printing. However, Galileo wanted the book to be reviewed and approved in Florence, where he lived and had much more influence. At first, Riccardi refused, but because a plague prevented Galileo from travelling to Rome, he eventually acquiesced except for the preface and conclud- ing sections, printing beginning early in 1631. With the further assistance of Riccardi’s cousin, a Florentine like Riccardi, the first printed copies of the Dialogue came from the press in Feb- ruary 1632. As Koestler tells us, “It took only a few weeks for Urban and the Holy Office to CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 961 discover that they had been outwitted.” Pope Urban VIII, as an old friend, was particularly incensed, treating Galileo’s deception as a personal affront.967 With the publication of the book, it became clear that it did not contain a balanced dialogue between the merits of the Ptolemaic and Copernican world systems. Galileo had gone far beyond treating the Copernican view as a hypothesis, derisively calling those who did not share this view ‘mental pygmies’, ‘dumb idiots’, and ‘hardly deserving to be called human beings’. The book was confiscated and Galileo was summoned to appear before the Inquisition in Rome. Nevertheless, it was not the Inquisition’s intention to completely destroy Galileo— to make him a martyr—merely to humble him. The verbal threat of torture if he did not re- cant was merely a ritual formula, which could not be carried out. Furthermore, during his trial, Galileo did not spend a single day in a prison cell. Rather, he lived in style in a five-room apartment. Indeed, from a legal point of view, the whole affair is pretty fuzzy. He was eventually found guilty on two counts, firstly of contravening Bellandine’s injunction and secondly of being suspect of heresy, that the Sun is the centre of the world. But as we saw on page 960, there were three different versions of Bellandine’s injunction. And the Sun-centred universe had never been officially declared a heresy. Urban, himself, had simply said that it was merely reckless, not heretical. As the intention was to treat the famous scholar with consideration and leniency, Galileo was sentenced to “formal prison during the Holy Office’s pleasure” and to repeat once a week for three years seven penitential psalms. In the event, the formal prison was initially the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s palace, eventually being his own house in Florence, where he spent the remainder of his life. And with the agreement of the ecclesiastical authorities, the reciting of the penitential psalms was delegated to his daughter, a Carmelite nun! Galileo was also presented with a formula of abjuration, which he read out, but apparently did not sign. This stated that he was vehemently suspect of heresy, “of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the world and immovable and that the Earth is not the centre and moves”. He went on to say to the court, as required, “I swear that in future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion against me.”968 There is no contemporary evidence that Galileo whispered Eppur si muove ‘And yet it moves’ at his trial.969 Nevertheless, Galileo’s supposed utterance, which became widely known 124 years later,970 well illustrates a fundamental point about the evolution of the mind. The Earth did not start orbiting the Sun as the result of the Coperni- can heliocentric revolution; it had done so since the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years earlier. In the event, Galileo spent the year following his trial writing Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, in which he laid down the foundations of the science of dynamics, on which “his true and immortal fame rests”.971 In this way, Galileo further demolished Aristotelian 962 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY physics, which had held sway for nearly two thousand years. Not only this. Galileo was to lay down the mathematical foundations of experimental, scientific method, as this passage from Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), published in 1623, well indicates: Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.972 All very well and good. But Galileo was working with a misconceived view of the Uni- verse—the second law of unwisdom. In Il Saggiatore, “He also drew a distinction between the properties of external objects and the sensations they cause in us—i.e., the distinction between primary and secondary qualities.”973 But this is putting second things first, as is so often done in society today, as the spiritual teacher Barry Long often pointed out in his seminars.974 We can put Western civilization back on its feet—for today it is upside down—by notic- ing the way that Galileo and others changed Aristotle’s heliocentric worldview. We all create our own reality though our mental models, which can be changed as evolution progresses. In a similar fashion, by recognizing that Consciousness is all there is, as the mystics have been doing for thousands of years, the Universe does not change. In the heliocentric revolution taking place today, it is just the concept of Universe that changes, not the Universe itself. The Universe has never been the physical universe that we see when look up at the stars. As is well known in the East, the manifest world of space, time, and matter, is nothing more than an appearance in Consciousness, an illusion, as are all our mental models of the relativistic world of form. Such a radical transformation of consciousness is absolutely essential if we are to have any chance of intelligently resolving the great economic and ecological crisis we all face today. And to do this, we need both a comprehensive model of the psychodynamics of society and a radically new scientific method from that laid down by Galileo with his dynamics of physical bodies, as this book is endeavouring to demonstrate. Most especially, as uniquely among all the species, our learning determines our behaviour, today’s children have very little chance of growing old enough to have children of their own, without self-inquiry, which currently lies outside the domain of science. We now come to Isaac Newton’s magnificent synthesis, which was to complete the great Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth revolutions and pave the way for the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, we know him principally as the author of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Opticks and the creator, independently with Leibniz, of the infinitesimal calculus. But Newton also wrote over a million words on both theology and alchemy, which has led to several new biographies CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 963 appearing in the last fifty years and a great Newton Project, whose goal is to make all New- ton’s writings freely available online.975 When Newton died in 1727 at the age of 84, he left no will and instructions what to do with his considerable wealth and voluminous writings, which he had apparently accumulated for prosperity, not throwing much away. His friend John Conduitt, a member of parliament and husband of Catherine Barton, the daughter of Newton’s half-sister Hannah Smith, acted as executor for Newton’s estate, the writings being passed to Conduitt’s daughter, also Cath- erine, who married Viscount Lymington, the son of the first Earl of Portsmouth and the father, with Catherine, of the second Earl.976 These Portsmouth Papers remained in the family until the fifth earl, appropriately called Isaac Newton Wallop,977 Newton’s half great great great grandnephew, offered them to the Cambridge University Library in 1872 ‘to advance the interests of science’. A syndicate of four scholars was given the task of assessing the scientific relevance of the material at its disposal, returning the theological and alchemical papers to the Portsmouth family as being of little scientific interest.978 In 1936, Viscount Lymington, who was to become the ninth earl, sent the remaining Portsmouth Papers to Sothebys, where they were sold for £9,000. The econo- mist John Maynard Keynes bought the alchemical papers, which he bequeathed to King’s College Cambridge in 1946. The bulk of the theological writings curiously ended up in Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.979 So what does this vast output tell us about Newton’s position in the evolution of the mind? Well, Keynes said that we need to reassess his popular image. As he said, Newton has come “to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist … I do not see him is this light … Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less that 10,000 years ago.”980 This may be so. But what really drove Newton was the inner search for Wholeness and the Truth. For him, “Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation.” This is a gen- uine mystical statement, telling us that Newton had glimpses, at least, of a Presence, which he called God, that is ever-present, even though his puritan Christian conditioning prevented him from fully expressing this innate Truth in his lifetime. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly this spiritual experience that informed his inquiries, for with the certainty of such inner- knowing, nothing else really matters. As we see in a moment, he was ready to sacrifice his academic career to maintain the integrity of his religious beliefs. But given the constraints of the culture he lived in, how could he express this sense of Wholeness, which is the True Nature of all of us, in concepts, words, and other symbols? Well, during the Renaissance, as the writings of the ancient Greeks and Arabs came to the 964 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY West, a belief emerged that the ancients had a vast body of knowledge that had since been lost called prisca sapientia ‘ancient wisdom’, from the Latin pristinus, the root of pristine, which has come to mean ‘pure, virginal, uncorrupted by civilization, having its original, un- marred condition’. Prisca sapientia is thus very close to what Leibniz, Newton’s contemporary, called philosophia perennis, although Aldous Huxley does not seem to have made this connection in The Perennial Philosophy. Of course, with the great Spiritual Renaissance currently taking place, we know much more about this ancient wisdom than was available to Newton. Nevertheless, he intuitively felt that the ancients originated in Wholeness and that it was his task to rediscover this innate sense of Wholeness by creating a synthesis of all knowledge, a unified theory of all the principles of the Universe. As he commented in his notebook, now in Jerusalem: So then it was one design of the first institution of the true religion to propose to mankind by the frame of the ancient temples, the study of the frame of the world as the true temple of the great God they worshipped … So then the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. For there is no way (without revelation) to come to the knowledge of a deity but by the frame of nature.981 In short, “God is known through his works,” the motto of the isaac-newton.org web site set up by the Canadian scholar David Snobelen,982 associated with the Newton Project in England. And it was this ‘frame of nature’ that Newton set out to discover. To achieve his goal, what this meant was that Newton would need to develop as a philosopher in Plato’s meaning of the word, by being a generalist “ready to taste every branch of learning”. Indeed, Newton said, “I am a friend of Plato. I am a friend of Aristotle. But Truth is my greater friend.” However, as Newton knew, he was living in a fragmented society not based on Wholeness and the Truth. For if it were, there would be no need to search for the wisdom of the ancients; he would have been able to learn this from those around him. So let us look a little at the social environment in which Newton was living. For today we are living in a society that is even more fragmented and removed from Reality and the Truth, partly because of the material success of the great Scientific Revolution. Isaac was born prematurely in the early hours of Christmas Day 1642, nine months after his parents married, by the Julian calendar still in operation, for the Gregorian calendar, introduced on 4th October 1582 in three or four Catholic countries, was regarded as Papist by Protestant England. England did not change to the continental calendar until 14th Sep- tember 1752, when the first day of the year was changed from 25th March to 1st January. So by the Figure 11.59: Newton’s birthplace CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 965 Gregorian calendar, Isaac was born on 4th January 1643. According to the International Ge- nealogical Index, he was christened on 1st January 1642 (1643) most probably in Colsterworth parish church near Woolsthorpe Manor, where he was born. The manor had been bought by Isaac’s grandfather, Robert, born about 1570, who had inherited some sixty acres of the best land in the area of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in southern Lincolnshire, near the counties of Leicestershire and Rutland, from his grandfather John Newton through his father Richard. John had been born a peasant at the beginning of the 1500s and had risen from husbandman to yeoman farmer in the English pecking order. So Newton’s father, also Isaac, was from a family on the rise in the social scale. In December 1639, Robert Newton had settled the entire Woolsthorpe estate on him, giving Isaac senior not a little money. When Robert died in 1641, Isaac thus became lord of a manor, a part of the administrative and legal system in England at that time, with jurisdiction over minor breaches of the peace, able to levy fines, but not imprison.983 Yet he could not write his name, a skill unnecessary to be a farmer. Newton’s mother, Hannah Ayscough (pronounced ‘Askew’), on the other hand, came from the lower gentry, sending their sons to Oxford and Cambridge, but whose family had fallen on hard times. She was born in Market Overton in Rutland, about nine kilometres south. So the marriage of Isaac Newton to Hannah Ayscough was a match of convenience, satisfying both families.984 Sadly, however, Newton’s father died on 6th October 1642, nearly three months before Isaac was born. On 27th January 1645 (English Julian calendar), when young Isaac was three, Hannah married Barnabas Smith, the rector of nearby North Witham parish, aged sixty-three, more than double her age, with whom she had three more children, Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah. As the Reverend Smith did not want Isaac in his home, the boy remained at Woolsthorpe Manor, where Hannah’s parents James and Margery Ayscough moved to look after him. During this time, Newton saw his mother only on sporadic occasions, even though she lived just two or three kilometres away. She moved back to Woolsthorpe Manor in 1653 with his three step-siblings, then aged six, two, and one, when Barnabas Smith died, when Isaac was eleven. Now much has been written about the psychopathology of genius, and there is no doubt that Newton’s formative years played an important role in his later creative development. For instance, in The Dynamics of Creativity, Anthony Storr suggests that early stages of development can lead to a depressive or schizoid state, which the creative personality seeks to heal. As he says, “The emotion characteristic of the former is a feeling of hopelessness and misery. The emotion pertaining to the latter is one of futility and lack of meaning,” which can be distinguished even though they are closely related to each other.985 966 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY As an illustration, in a chapter called ‘New Models of the Universe’, Storr labels both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as ‘schizoid’. It is important to recognize here that this term is relativistic. As Erich Fromm has pointed out, we live in a sick society, suffering from schizo- phrenia, literally ‘split mind’, detached from Reality. So if anyone wishes to heal their split minds, they need to distance themselves from the rest of society. This is what both Newton and Einstein did, being guided by the convergent powers of evolution more than the divergent ones that govern most people’s way of learning. For instance, Storr tells us that from a very early age Einstein saw himself as a separate entity, “influenced as little as possible by other people”.986 So to develop their unifying worldviews, both Newton and Einstein spent much time in solitude. For as Edward Gibbin said, “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist.”987 In Newton’s case, he first needed to deal with having no father figure in his early life and then with having only occasional contact with his mother between the critical ages of three and eleven. Although there is some evidence that Isaac was Hannah’s favourite child,988 as her first-born, her abandonment of him must have felt like a double message. For as they say, “Ac- tions speak louder than words.” This ambivalent relationship with his mother was a model that determined most of Newton’s relationships with the rest of society throughout his life, a situation that is inevitable when evolution is more focused on paedomorphosis, ‘the rejuve- nating shaping of the young’, than on gerontomorphosis, ‘the constricting shaping of the old’. This is nowhere clearer than in his general social environment. In order to fulfil his destiny, Newton needed to be accepted by the academic community, while, at the same time, questioning many of the fundamental beliefs of the culture he was born into. So he needed to tread very carefully, especially with regard to his heretical religious views. This is a rather confused story that has troubled the fragmented mind for many centuries. Nevertheless, let us see if we can shed some light on the situation with mystical experience and semantic clarity. The story begins with Arius (c. 250–c. 336 CE), a Christian priest who was based in Alex- andria. Arius took the opposite view to the Gnostics, who, following Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Thomas and their own inner experiences, knew that everyone lives constantly in union with the Divine, not only Jesus. On the other hand, Arius said that no one, not even Jesus, is identical with God. To Arius, God is transcendent with absolute sovereignty,989 a complete split between humanity and the Divine. In Arian theology, human beings, including Jesus, are creatures, encapsulated in the slogan ēn pote hote ouk ēn ‘there was once a time when he was not.’990 At the Nicene Council in 325, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, vehemently opposed this Arian doctrine, as he did the Gnostic one, as we saw on page 862. So after the Nicene CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 967 Creed said that Jesus Christ was the only begotten Son of God, it went on to say that he was “begotten, not made, being of one substance.” The Greek word for one substance here is omoousion ‘the Homoousion’, neuter of omoousios, from omo- ‘same’ and ousiā ‘being, essence, substance’. Today, in our materialistic world, we primarily think of substance as matter, “that which has mass and occupies space”. However, this is not the original meaning of the word, which has a Latin root substantia ‘essence, substance’, from substare ‘to be present, to stand firm’, from sub- ‘under’ and stāre ‘to stand’. So substance originally meant ‘essential nature’, beneath the surface of the physical universe accessible through the senses. Latin substantia is thus semantically related to the Greek parousiā ‘presence’, a property of Plato’s universals, as we saw on page 839. And on page 831, we saw that Aristotle referred to the æther as ‘quintessence’, the fifth element, the second part being the Latin translation of the Greek ousiā. In Christian theology, the Greek omoousios, ‘same essence’ or ‘one substance’, denotes “the divine nature or essence of which the three Persons of the Trinity are one”.991 The notion of the Trinity is not uncommon in religion. For instance, in Hinduism, the Formless Brahman has three forms (trimūrti), Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, the deities or divine energies of creation, destruction, and maintenance, respectively. In Christianity, the Trinity is regarded as the inner nature of the Godhead, existing in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.992 This anthropomorphic concept of God arises from Genesis in the Jewish Torah: “And God created man in His [own] image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”993 In Judaism and Christianity, God is thus a superhuman person having power over human affairs and destiny, united in the three persons of the Trinity in Christi- anity. This notion comes primary from Matthew, who said in the penultimate verse of his gospel, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”994 However, the Nicene Creed is very careful to say that Jesus Christ is begotten, not created. This is a subtle distinction, which apparently relates to the difference between human procre- ation, leading to the birth of babies through the generations, and human creation, producing new artefacts, such as bowls and houses. In the latter, there is an apparent separation between the creator and the created, while in the former—in the exclusive case of Jesus—there is no such separation. It was this latter belief that Arius objected to. “If Christ is divine, it can only be in the sense that he is ‘divinized’ by his association with God, but he remains subordinate to God, as a son to a father.”995 Like Gnosticism, Arianism was declared a heresy by the Roman Catholic Church, punishable by death for many centuries. Yet Newton was an Arian, contrary to the fundamental beliefs of both the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, within which he was brought up. It might seem strange to separate the human from the Divine for someone who was so dedi- 968 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY cated to rediscovering the Wholeness that the ancients knew, but which had been lost as the egoic, analytical mind began to dominate the psyche. But Newton was working within a context defined by the Babylonian concept of the Universe and the Judeo-Christian concept of God. As Michael White points out, Newton was not a pantheist and did not regard the concepts of God and the Universe as identical,996 which is necessary to develop the synthesis of everything that Newton was seeking. It is particularly ironic that fate led him to The College of the Holy and Undivided Trin- ity, to give Trinity College at the University of Cambridge its full name. This college seems to have been chosen because it was the one attended by his uncle William Ayscough and Humphrey Babington, a senior fellow, who was the brother of his landlady Mrs Clark, when he took lodgings in Grantham, where he went to school. Apart from Newton’s brilliance, it was such connections that enabled Newton to enroll at Trinity College on 5th June 1661,997 when nineteen, a couple of years older than most of the other sizers and subsizers, freshmen who waited on the tutors and more wealthy students. Newton began as a subsizer, the lowest of the low, even emptying bedpans, even though his mother could have afforded a larger allowance. Having been very reluctant for him to go to university, she seemed determined to make his life as uncomfortable as possible when he eventually did go, perhaps in the hope that he would soon return home to the Manor. Newton took the matriculation oath on 8th July 1661,998 was elected Scholar on 28th April 1664,999 received his Batchelor of Arts in the spring of 1665 as a second-class graduate,1000 was elected a minor fellow on 2nd October 1667,1001 and became a major fellow on 7th July 1668, when he became Master of Arts.1002 Then on 29th October 1669, he was appointed as the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, succeeding Isaac Barrow.1003 But this rapid rise from subsizer to professor in less than eight years before Newton was twenty-seven not only “left his social position somewhat blurred and confused.”1004 As a fellow of Trinity College, he was also required to take holy orders within seven years if he were to maintain his remunerative fellowship (and professorship).1005 So at the beginning of 1674, Newton went to London to petition King Charles II through his influential connections to give him special dispensation, as a foremost mathematics professor, from becoming a priest. To give all just encouragement to such learned men, Charles acceded, stating that the Luca- sian professor was exempted from taking holy orders unless “he himself desires to …”1006 While in London, Newton also attended his first meeting of the Royal Society on 18th Feb- ruary 1674,1007 to which he had been elected as a fellow on 11th January 1672.1008 But why was Newton an Arian, why did he hate the Catholics so much, calling them blas- phemers and the Church ‘the Whore of Babylon’,1009 and how did this affect his relationships with those around him? Well, Michael White suggests that this is because he never knew his father, an uneducated man who he could not relate to. So how could he “contemplate the CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 969 notion of a Trinity, a concept involving not just attachment to ‘the Father’ but the sharing of identity”?1010 Besides, Newton was well aware that his genius set him apart from most of those around him, seeing himself as the chosen one, even the Christ, born on Christmas Day.1011 In a similar fashion, Rob Iliffe, co-editorial director of the Newton Project,1012 says, “Newton believed that he had been chosen by God to discover the truth about the decline of Christianity.”1013 On one of his alchemical writings, Newton signed himself Jeova sanctus unus ‘God’s holy one’, an anagram of his Latin name Isaacus Neuutonus.1014 Frank E. Manuel, in his psychoanalytical study of Newton’s life, suggests how these beliefs could have come about. As he says, “There is a belief among many peoples that a male child born after his father’s death, a posthumous, is endowed with supernatural powers.”1015 Fur- thermore, “When a child is told of the death of his father before he was born, an almost metaphysical anguish may seize him.”1016 Today, there are a multitude of psychospiritual therapies available to help resolve such mental disturbances. But Newton knew none of this. He knew nothing of Eastern mysticism or even apparently the works of the Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart or the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, written at the beginning of the fourteenth century in the dialect of the East Midlands,1017 where he was born. Newton preferred to study the Bible, particularly the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelations. Because he was destined to take evolution in a radically new direction, he most probably felt that his social environment was predominantly hostile. He was particularly sensitive to criticism, having some famous arguments with Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed, and Gottfried Leibniz, in particular. To counteract these feelings, what most characterizes Newton’s work is the pursuit of ex- cellence, the search for perfection, paying meticulous attention to detail, even when encompassing what he saw as the Totality of Existence in his vision. As Manuel says, “To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid, tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man.” But we shouldn’t really be surprised that Newton suffered from anxiety, for he was trying to find freedom within a culture imprisoned by fear. Einstein did not suffer to the same extent because he was less of a revolutionary than Newton, or indeed of Charles Darwin and David Bohm, both of whom had psychological difficulties in their relationships. In old age, Newton told John Conduitt, his adoring nephew-in-law, that his interest in academic studies had been sparked by a fight with a school bully at Grantham King’s School, which he attended from the ages of twelve to nineteen, with a nearly two-year hiatus beginning at sixteen in 1659,1018 when his mother withdrew him from the school, trying to make a ‘grazier’ of him.1019 Even though many of her male relatives had been or were being educated, she did not see the benefits for Isaac, who should manage the estate, becoming the lord of the 970 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY manor as a rustic farmer when he reached his majority. Anyway, Newton got the better of the bully in the school playground and then set about beating him in the classroom, for his ad- versary was one place above him in the rankings, both near the bottom of the class.1020 As a result, Newton quickly rose to the top of the class, much to the admiration of Henry/John Stokes,1021 the headmaster at the school, who first saw young Isaac’s potential, and who helped persuade Hannah Ayscough-Newton-Smith to send her son to Cambridge. Although Newton spent the first half of his life in academic circles, presumably learning much from the prescribed curriculum, he was primarily an autodidact, from the Greek auto- didaktos, ‘one who is self-taught’, from auto ‘self’ and didaskein ‘to teach, educate’. The basic curriculum at Grantham Grammar School was almost exclusively on the Latin classics, with a smattering of Greek and Hebrew,1022 presumably so that the pupils could read the Bible in its original languages. The pupils were expected to learn the classics and scriptures parrot- fashion,1023 not very inspiring for an inquisitive spirit like the adolescent Isaac. Not surprisingly, he was a very slow starter. Furthermore, almost no mathematics or natural philosophy was taught. Nevertheless, this basic education served Newton well. The mathematical and scientific works that he would read a few years later were written mostly in Latin, the lingua franca of European scholarship at the time.1024 Not that the formal curriculum was the only source of information for young Isaac’s curious mind. When Barnabas Smith died, his libraryof two or three hundred books of mainly theological treatises was transferred to Woolsthorpe Manor.1025 But the main source of Isaac’s inspiration was the library of Mr Clark, an apothecary in Grantham, where he lodged because the twelve kilometres from the Manor was too far to travel on a daily basis. Interestingly, almost as soon as his mother returned to Woolsthorpe, Isaac lived in Grantham for long periods of time. It is therefore not surprising that the rift with his mother never fully healed. Mr Clark (no first name) inherited his collection of books from his brother Dr Joseph Clark, the usher (assistant teacher) at King’s School. One of the first books that Isaac found in Grantham was The Mysteries of Nature and Art published in 1634 and written by John Bate, about whom little is known. The book was in four parts ‘Water works’, Fire works’, ‘Drawing, Washing, Limming, Painting, and Engraving’, and ‘Sundry Experi- ments’, collections of both others’ discoveries and Bate’s own inventions. In this well-illustrated book, Bate describes many machines and devices, such as a water mill and a kite,1026 which inspired Newton to begin his own experiments, for he was blessed, not only with a natural mechanical aptitude, but also 11.60: Newton’s reflecting telescope with an artistic and poetic temperament. Such manual skills CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 971 were not regarded as demeaning, as they had been in Aristotle’s day. Indeed, it was such skills, rather than his mathematical or natural philosophical ones, that first led to Newton being elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1668, he built a reflecting telescope, able to magnify nearly forty times, overcoming the problem of chromatic aberration of refraction telescopes. Newton was justly proud of his achievement, as he told John Conduitt sixty years later, not able to keep it secret, like his other work, greatly impressing the fellows of the Society.1027 Living in the house of an apothecary also sparked Newton’s interest in alchemy, as both chemistry and as a spiritual quest, necessary to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients. For as Jay Ramsay has said, “Above all, alchemy is about wholeness.”1028 “It brings spirit and matter together rather than separating them. It is profoundly non-dualistic in this sense, as opposed to the orthodox Christian Church.”1029 “Alchemy is vibrant: it reaches to the source of life.”1030 It is “a physical process to do with self-knowledge”.1031 This is not how most people understand alchemy today. Alchemy is most often seen as the search for the philosopher’s stone, a magical material capable of turning base metals into gold. The philosopher’s stone is associated with an elixir of life, a potion that supposedly grants the drinker eternal life or immortality.1032 In alchemy, such a path of knowledge is called the Magnum Opus ‘Great Work’,1033 whose ultimate goal is enlightenment, enabling the practitioner to return Home to Paradise. So the philosopher’s stone in the external world is really just a metaphor for the voyage of inner discovery, leading to Wholeness, the union of all opposites. The Principle of Unity, the fundamental design principle of the Universe, is thus the elixir of life that we are all seeking deep inside ourselves, recognizing that while our bodies and minds are mortal, our True Nature, as Love and Consciousness, is immortal. Newton seemed to have something of such an intuitive notion in his search for a synthesis of all knowledge. But how did alchemy get its reputation as a magical way to Wholeness and why have the chemists since rejected this path of knowledge? Well, as far as I can tell, as people experimented with combining a multitude of substances, sometimes heating them and treating them in various ways, amazing transformations occurred that appeared quite inexpli- cable. As they were still in touch, to some extent with the Divine, they felt that the alchemical process was a microcosmic representation of the Creation;1034 that there were hidden energies at work in the transformation. So as part of the spiritual quest to rediscover their True Na- ture, they engaged in religious rituals as they conducted their experiments. It is this transformational nature of chemical reactions that appears to have led to the term alchemy, although there is some uncertainty about its etymology. One view is that alchemy derives from Arabic alkīmyā, from al- ‘the’ and Late Greek chemeíā ‘art of alloying metals’, from cheîn ‘to pour’, from a PIE base *gheu- ‘to pour, pour a libation’, also the root of found ‘cast metal’, via Latin fundere ‘to melt, pour out’. There has also been some speculation that Arabic kīmyā and Greek chemeíā were rather associated with Chemeía, the ancient name for 972 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Egypt, meaning ‘the land of the black earth’, because alchemy was practiced early on in Egypt. But some authorities now feel a closer affinity with chemeíā ‘pouring’, as it applied to the mix- ing of juices from various plants among the Alexandrian alchemists.1035 There is no indication that Newton accompanied his alchemical experiments with rituals. He seems to have taken the search for the philosopher’s stone literally, while still sensing the existence of hidden forces at work, called ‘supernatural’ in the West, even though they are entirely natural, being born from our Divine Source. So he was more an occultist than a mystic, from the Latin occultus, past particple of occulěre ‘to cover over, hide, conceal’, from ob- ‘over’ and cēlāre ‘hide, conceal, keep secret’, from PIE base *kel- ‘to cover, conceal, save’, also the root of hell, hole, and apocalypse. So the prefix ob- has a reinforcing effect. The occult is something that is really deeply hidden from those who are not awakened. In the event, Newton never found the philosopher’s stone in his crucible, abandoning the alchemical experiments that he had been performing for twenty to thirty years in the mid 1690s. Nevertheless, they clearly had an important influence on the formation of his concept of universal gravitation. He compared the rotation of the moon to an object tied to a string, rotating in a circle as someone swings the object around her or his head. If the string is cut, or the person lets go of the string, as a hammer thrower does in athletics, the object flies away with a centrifugal force. But the Moon does not do this. It remains circling the Earth. So Newton implicitly reasoned that by the Principle of Unity, there must be a centripetal force drawing the Moon to the Earth. But there is clearly no string between the Moon and the Earth, and Newton searched in vain for another material explanation. In the end, inspired by his alchemical insights, he realized that he would need to opt for a nonphysical explanation, called ‘action at a distance’, which was accepted by most because he was able to express this relationship in quantitative mathematics. On 15th April 1727, Newton told William Stukeley, Newton’s first biographer, that he had got the idea of universal gravity from an apple falling in his mother’s orchard in the summer of 1666.1036 He must also have told his half-niece Catherine Barton the story, for both her husband John Conduitt1037 and Voltaire1038 repeated it. This sounds quite plausible and may well have contributed to the birth of the idea. But Michael White suggests that the apple story was a later fabrication to suppress the fact that much of the inspiration for the theory of gravity came from his later alchemical work.1039 In other words, the concept of field in physics originated in the occult. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the French were very sceptical of the notion of action at a distance, still believing in Cartesian vortices, which Newton had denounced, forty years after the publication of Principia, as Voltaire tells us in his Letters on England.1040 Voltaire went on to say that Newton cautioned readers of his book not to confuse gravitation with what the Ancients called occult qualities.1041 Perhaps this is not surprising, because if people had known that the CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 973 idea for gravitational fields had come from his attempts to turn base metal into gold, experiments that were still punishable by death, who knows what his fate might have been? Togeth- er with his heretic religious views, it is not surprising that Newton appeared neurotic to many of those around him and biographers today. I have seen no suggestion that Newton got the idea for action at a distance from the magnetic effects of lodestones, used in compasses. In the event, it was not until the nineteenth century that James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) developed his mathematical theory of electromagnetic radiation,1042 the unification of magnetic and electrical fields that Michael Faraday (1791–1867) had been studying in his laboratory.1043 Einstein then spent the last thirty years of his life attempting to unify gravitational and electromagnetic fields in what he called the unified field theory, apparently neglecting the strong and weak nucleic fields that are the other two fundamental forces that the physicists are attempting to unify in the theory of everything, ignoring what Rupert Sheldrake calls morphogenetic fields. As this book is seeking to demonstrate, all these fields can be unified in the Unified Relationships Theory within the framework of Integral Relational Logic. Newton’s gravitational fields are thus just an example of meaningful relationships in the URT. IRL is the frame of nature or system of coordinates that Newton realized he would need to construct his synthesis of all knowledge. Once again, the original impetus for this probably came from Joseph Clark’s library of books at the apothecary’s house where he was lodging. It is likely that in his mid-teens he first discovered Francis Bacon and René Descartes, as well as Plato and Aristotle, “acquiring a fuller and more useful education than he could possibly have gained within the narrow confines of the school curriculum.”1044 However, it was not until he went to university that he found what he needed for his comprehensive model of the dynamics of material bodies. This might seem surprising, for aren’t universities supposed to be places where students learn what their teachers want them to learn? Indeed, despite the upheavals of the Puritan revolution and the Restoration, the basic curriculum had not broken the mould in which it had been cast four hundred years earlier. But things were beginning to change when Newton went up to Cambridge. In 1661, Richard Westfall tells us that the official curriculum was in an advanced state of decomposition. It was the tutors in the colleges who determined the curriculum more than the university, and increasingly they allowed students to go their own way.1045 Looking at the nine hundred-year lifespan of the universities to date, it seems that there was a tiny window of opportunity and freedom in the mid seventeenth century that had not existed before and hasn’t really existed since and which Newton was able to take full advantage of. Through the ages, the universities have sought to preserve the status quo, an extremely dangerous situation as evolution now passes through the most momentous turning point in its fourteen billion-year history. Even today, the world of learning is based on the seven 974 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY pillars of unwisdom, with consequences we look at in Chapter 12, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ on page 989. Newton found the initial frame of nature that he was seeking for his study of dynamics around the end of his third year at Cambridge in the spring or summer of 1664 in Descartes’ Geometry. Not only did Cartesian coordinates provide him with a three-dimensional geometrical framework for Euclidean space, Descartes’ discovery that you can describe curves and surfaces in algebraic expressions, in what is now called analytical geometry, was a an essential prerequisite for the development of the calculus. Newton’s absolute framework was to last until Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which extended the framework of Cartesian coordinates into four dimensions of space-time. But in the general theory, Einstein had to adopt non-Euclidean geometry in order to accommodate the view that space-time is curved. The discovery of incompatible quantum effects then left the physicists struggling to find a frame of nature that they could use for their theory of everything. Even though David Bohm went beneath the surface of things, into hidden realms, with his theory of the implicate order, he was not able to find a suitable mathematical framework. This is because if we are to complete Newton’s project of a synthesis of all knowledge, including our inner knowing of the Divine, we need a semantic rather than a mathematical framework, as described in Part I of this book on Integral Relational Logic. For arcane mathematics cannot possibly enhance our understanding of our place in the overall scheme of things if the semantic model on which the calculations are based is not sound. By providing a coherent framework for a comprehensive model of the psychodynamics of the whole of society, not just the dynamics of our external world, IRL is the frame of nature that Newton was seeking for both his studies of natural philosophy and his theological and alchemical ones. And as we saw in Chapter 6, ‘A Holistic Theory of Evolution’ on page 521, IRL and the URT enable us to revise Newton’s study of the chronology of the Bible and his calculations for the impending apocalypse, which will reveal the fundamental design principle of the Universe, expressed in Revelations in several places by this affirmation: “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Newton’s discovery of the magic of mathematics is nothing short of miraculous. Starting with no knowledge of classical Euclidean geometry, by the spring of 1665, he had discovered the fundamental theorem of the calculus: differentiation and integration are inverse processes.1046 And by October 1666, “not yet twenty-four, without benefit of formal instruction, [he] had become the leading mathematician in Europe.” Yet no one except Isaac Barrow knew of his existence, and it is doubtful if even the Lucasian professor was aware of his accomplish- ment at the time.1047 CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 975 Richard Westfall provides an extensive description of Newton’s way of working in his in- depth biography of Newton as a scientist, aptly called Never at Rest. Newton would begin with a set of questions or problems to be answered or solved. In natural philosophy, he set down forty-five headings within which to organize his thoughts in a document called Ques- tiones quædam Philosophcæ, most probably written in the latter half of 1664. It was on this document that Newton later wrote Amicus Plato amicus Arisoteles magis amica veritas. For by this time, Newton had left the world of Aristotle far behind, laying down the foundations of his work as an experimental scientist, a method of inquiry that had been little used until that time.1048 In mathematics, at about the same time, Newton drew up a list of twelve problems, extending it to twenty-two in five distinct groups. He was nothing if not comprehensive and incredibly systematic in his studies, implicitly using IRL to bring order to his work. For instance, he would lay out an ordered series of equations and seek to find patterns hidden within them, generalizing from the particular. He also discovered the mathematical technique of induction, not from Euclid, but from a work by John Wallis on infinite series, which was influential on both Newton’s generalization of the binomial series and on the development of the infinitesimal calculus.1049 Indeed, Newton’s neglect of Euclid nearly got him into trouble with his academic progress. In 1663, he had bought a book on judicial astrology1050 (one of his few ventures into this occult science), and being unable to cast a figure, bought a copy of Euclid. He found the theorems to be obvious, despising the book as trivial. But when Isaac Barrow came to test Newton in 1664 for his scholarship, Barrow, a leading authority on Euclid, found Newton lacking. He could not imagine someone studying Descartes before Euclid, as Newton had done. In the event, Newton got his scholarship, giving him the assurance of a further four years at the university and he was quick to rectify his deficiencies with Euclidean geometry.1051 We now come to what has been called Newton’s anni mirabiles ‘wonderful years’ of 1665 to 1667 or annus mirabilis of 1666, referring to John Dryden’s poem of this name.1052 Because of the plague, Newton spent most of this time at home in Woolsthorpe, from August 1665 to March 1666 and from June 1666 to April 1667.1053 Despite these interruptions, Newton was able to maintain the continuity of his studies, being totally absorbed in them. It has been suggested that the theory of optics, the calculus, and the concept of universal gravitation were fully formed at this time in flashes of inspiration. But this is not how the mind evolves. As Thomas A. Edison famously said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” In the event, Principia Mathematica was not published until 1687 (in Latin) and Opticks not until 1704, written in English initially. Newton’s work on the calculus, which he called 976 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY the science of fluxions, influenced by Barrow’s notion of motion, appeared in bits and drabs as unpublished manuscripts informally circulated amongst the cognoscenti, which led to the famous dispute with Leibniz in 1711. It seems that Newton was as much angry with himself as with Leibniz for not having published earlier. In the case of Principia, there was a twenty- year gestation period before this epoch-making treatise was ready to be born, a time when Newton seems to have spent more time studying the Bible and with his alchemical experiments than with mathematics and natural philosophy. It was possible for Principia to be published because the problems it solved were in the air. In January 1684, Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke met at the Royal Society to discuss how the laws of celestial motion could be derived from the inverse-square relation. From Kepler’s third law, they seemed to be aware that the force between the Sun and the planets must decrease in proportion to the square of the distance of the planets and the Sun. At the meeting, Hooke claimed that he had found the solution, but intended to keep it secret. Both Wren and Halley were sceptical of Hooke’s claim, for Hooke seemed to have a reputation for delusion.1054 Being aware of Newton’s reputation as a mathematician, Halley decided to visit him in August 1684, asking him an epoch-making question. This is Newton’s account of the meeting as told later to Abraham DeMoivre: “The Dr asked him what he thought the Curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of the distance from it. Sr Isaac replied immediately that it would be an Ellipsis,” saying that he knew this because he had calculated it. Halley asked Newton to send him the calculation without further delay, which Newton duly did in a nine-page paper called De motu corporum in gyrum (On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit).1055 This form of the question had great significance, for even though Kepler had shown with his first law of planetary motion that planets circle the Sun in elliptical orbits, he had not derived this law from the inverse-square force, which Newton did under Halley’s stimulus. Ac- cordingly, when Halley received De motu, “he recognized that the treatise embodied a step forward in celestial mechanics so immense as to constitute a revolution.” On 10th December 1684, Halley presented De motu to the Royal Society, setting in motion a series of events that was to lead to the publication of the three volumes of Principia in the spring of 1687. Indeed, by this time, Newton had already embarked on the writing of his magnum opus; externally spurred on by Halley, inspired by his own inner creativity, he was receptive to the idea that he should go public with his great synthesis.1056 Newton acknowledged his debt to Halley in the Preface to the first edition, written on 8th May 1686, by saying, “it was he who started me off on the road to this publication. For when he had obtained my demonstration of the shape of the celestial orbits, he never stopped asking me to communicate it to the Royal Society, whose subsequent encouragement and kind pa- CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 977 tronage made me think about publishing it.”1057 The book is actually in three books, the first two called The Motion of Bodies, split into two because of their length, the third being called The System of the World, the climax of the entire work, unifying Galileo’s and Kepler’s studies of the terrestrial and extraterrestrial forces at work in the Universe. The structure of the entire work is similar, in some respects, to Euclid’s Elements. Principia begins with eight definitions, such as centripetal and impressed force, and goes on to state three axioms, or laws of motion: Law 1: Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except in so far as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed. Law 2: A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed. Law 3: To any action there is an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction.1058 Book 1 then consisted of 97 propositions, divided into 50 theorems and 47 problems, Book 2 had a further 53 propositions (41 theorems and 12 problems), with Book 3 having 42 propositions (20 and 22 theorems and problems, respectively). In addition, there were a number of lemmas, corollaries, and scholaria (further explanations like endnotes), a monumental undertaking that led him to being hailed as a foremost figure who shaped the modern intellect. In 2005, the Royal Society conducted a poll of its members and of the general public finding that Newton had a greater impact on both science and humankind than Einstein. Ta- ble 11.21 shows the results:1059 Newton Einstein Scientists Public Scientists Public Influence in science 86.2% 61.8% 13.1% 38.2% Benefit for humanity 60.9% 50.1% 39.1% 49.9% Table 11.21: Scientific and social impact of Newton and Einstein Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), an Italian mathematician and astronomer was later to say, that of all the great geniuses, Newton was “the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” And the English poet Alexander Pope (1688– 1744) was moved to write this epitaph: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, “Let Newton be” and all was light.1060 However, Newton was very well aware that Principia was just work in progress. It did not enable him to complete his search for Wholeness and the Truth by creating a synthesis of everything within an all-encompassing frame of nature. This ultimate thesis had to wait until the invention of the stored-program computer in the middle of the twentieth century showed the 978 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY limitations of the mechanistic worldview, even more than quantum physics and holistic science, viewing nature as a living organism, have done. But publishing the Semantic Principles of Natural Philosophy presents an even greater challenge than the publication of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. As we have seen, Principia answered questions that were in the air at the time. But even though an equally po- tent scientific revolution has been in the air for the last three decades, it is not easy to publish Wholeness because it solves a problem that apparently no one knows that exists: what is the force that is causing the pace of evolutionary change to accelerate exponentially? This question is not on the agenda because it cannot be answered within any scientific worldview that exists at the moment or with any previous, fragmented system of thought. Educated people are generally so conditioned by their university experience, it is virtually impossible for them to become free of their strait-jackets. Like someone who is destined to become a concert pianist or violin virtuoso, it is necessary to start practising in early childhood, questioning the fundamental assumptions of the culture we are born into no later than eight years of age. For the older one is when beginning this healing, awakening, and liberating process, the more difficult it is to accomplish. So we mostly remain in the darkness, not only continuing to manage our business affairs having little understanding of the evolutionary energies that cause us to behave as we do, but also trying to prevent others from doing so, a critical situation that we examine further in Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1027.

The birth of modern science With the publication of Newton’s great synthesis within the geometric framework of Carte- sian coordinates, evolution’s divergent tendencies became ever stronger compared with its convergent ones. Gone was Newton’s attempt to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients; gone was his attempt to create a synthesis of all knowledge, of which Descartes and Francis Bacon had also dreamed. The Principia was not seen as a major step towards evolution’s glorious culmination, when we can return Home to Paradise, which our forebears lived in long before the Fall in the Garden of Eden and which we enjoyed in our mothers’ wombs. Although Newton did not accept Descartes’ view of a mechanistic universe wound up by God at the beginning of time like a clock, for he was very well aware that the Divine is ever present, Lagrange, at least, thought Newton’s system of the world was the final word on the subject. People began to believe, under the influence of science, which became the predominant religion, that the superstitions of our ancestors could be laid to rest with the triumph of science over religion. Today, a large section of society believes that the ancients have nothing to tell us about the Truth, although a growing number are also fascinated by the myths of all cultures. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 979 So natural philosophy became the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology (botany and zoology), and geology, investigating just the surface of the Universe, losing touch with the original meanings of nature, philosophy, and physics. The world of learning became ever more specialized, with the various sciences fragmenting into more and more subdomains of study, so that no scientist could see the big picture, how all their different models could fit together in a coherent whole. Plan to add more on how modern science has become more and more specialized, taking us further and further away from Reality

The birth of modern philosophy In the meantime, with the great schism between science and theology, philosophy became a specialized subject in what Bertrand Russell called a No Man’s Land between reason and revelation,1061 somewhat different from Plato’s conception of the word. Indeed, with the mind becoming ever more fragmented, philosophy came to be known as ‘Modern Philosophy’ to distinguish it from Ancient and Medieval Philosophy,1062 and presumably Natural Philoso- phy. Another term for this pivotal period in the evolution of the mind is Age of Reason,1063 sometimes called the Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and sometimes seen as a preceding period.1064 René Descartes is generally regarded as the father of modern philosophy, with a remarkable independence of mind considering he attended the Catholic University of Paris. Accord- ing to Bryan Magee, the core of modern academic philosophy today is about the nature, scope, and limits of human knowledge, called epistemology by philosophers,1065 from Greek epistēmē ‘knowledge’, from epistasthai ‘to understand’, from epi- ‘over, near’ and histasthai ‘to stand’, from PIE-base *stā- ‘to stand’, the ultimate root of many other English words. Inspired by his dream in Ulm in 1619, Descartes accordingly set out to find a certain foundation on which all the sciences could stand. As the Cartesian scholar Bernard Williams said, in the first half of the seventeenth century, it was still a reasonable project for one man to have such an idea. However, as he went on to say, such a project would be regarded as a piece of ‘megalo- maniac insanity’ in the modern world.1066 Ah well! It seems that that healing the mind in Wholeness so that we can learn to live in love, peace, and harmony with each other and our environment is regarded as an act of insanity in today’s crazy world. Descartes had no such inhibitions. In order to lay down the foundations of all the sciences, he knew that he would need to follow the time-honoured maxim “Know thyself.” So he set out through self-inquiry to understand his relationship as a conscious being to God and his external material world, which included his body. In this respect, Descartes appears as a near mystic in The Meditations. Not only did he clearly know the Divine with absolute certainty, he believed that “body, figure, extensions, movement and place are only fictions of my 980 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY mind,”1067 not unlike the concept of maya ‘illusion’ in the East. He was also aware of the coherent light of Consciousness, as this sentence indicates: “the natural light teaches me clearly that ideas are in me as pictures or images.”1068 However, because Descartes was constrained by the first, second, and seventh pillars of unwisdom, this was only conceptual understanding, not gnosis. He was thus unable to find the gnostic and ontological foundations on which Integral Relational Logic is built, described in Chapter 1. Still holding on to the Christian concept of God and the natural philosopher’s concept of Universe, he was not able to unify reason and mysticism. He called himself “nothing but a thinking thing” whose creation and continued existence must depend on some form of power. However, Descartes said, “if such a power resided in me, indeed I should at the very least be conscious of it; but I am conscious of no such power and, thereby, I know evidently that I depend on some being different from myself.”1069 This is clearly the first pillar of unwisdom at work. Although Descartes saw God and himself as two separate beings, he was not entirely ignorant of the Principle of Unity. As he said, “I cannot conceive … a mountain without a valley … they … cannot in any way be separated from each other.”1070 However, in conformity with Aristotle’s either-or Law of Contradiction, he was essentially a dualist. As he said, “I am a thinking and non-extended thing,” while a “stone, on the contrary, is an extended non- thinking thing.” He called both the stone and himself ‘substances’ even though he could see a notable difference between these two concepts.1071 This gave rise to the split between res cogitans ‘thinking substance, mind, or soul’ and res extensa ‘extended substance’, by which he meant an object with breadth, width, and height occupying space. As Magee tells us “ ‘Cartesian dualism’, the bifurcation of nature between mind and matter, observer and observed, subject and object … has become built into the whole of Western man’s way of looking at things, including the whole of science.”1072 A notable exception to this rule was David Bohm, who sought to show, in unifying the incompatibilities between quantum and relativity theories, “that matter and consciousness have the implicate order in common.”1073 Another exception is this book, which is based on the Principle of Unity, showing that the entire world of form, both physical and nonphysical, is merely an appearance in or abstraction from Consciousness, the Datum of the Universe. Such a notion is absolutely essential if we are to intelligently manage our business affairs with full consciousness of what we are doing. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 981

Even though Descartes did not succeed in find- 1st Law of 2nd Law of Unwisdom Unwisdom ing the gnostic foundation, the ontological and Denial of Mechanistic epistemological framework, and the Cosmic Con- Gnosis worldview text for all knowledge, no other philosopher since then has attempted to establish the world of learn- Modern Philosophy ing on the Truth. For as Descartes, himself, said, “the destruction of the foundations necessarily brings down with it the rest of the edifice.”1074 And 7th Law of that is not something that anyone would entertain Unwisdom Law of lightly. So the evolution of modern philosophy has Contradiction been constrained by at least the first, second, and 11.61: Major influences on modern philosophy seventh laws of unwisdom, as Figure 11.61 illustrates. It is not surprising therefore that Immanuel Kant saw philosophy as a ‘chaotic battle- field’,1075 as it remains today, far removed from the love of wisdom. Because of this appalling mess, it is not easy to say something intelligent about the evolution of modern philosophy over the past four or five hundred years. Philosophy became ever more specialized with its own particular language, sometimes obscurely written, only understood by professional philosophers. While the early modern philosophers were reasonably independent thinkers, working outside the universities, starting with Kant, philosophy moved into academia. Today, it has become institutionalized, a narrow subject with tentative relationships with many other subjects, including religion, science, psychology, and mathematics through logic, the science of reason. We can see a major cause of this fragmentation when we look at modern philosophy and its successor postmodernism as a whole. In conformity with the seventh pillar of unwisdom, philosophers formed concepts and refinements of those concepts that often became isms, conflicting schools of philosophy each attached to individual philosophers as ‘ists’ in an either-or manner. Table 11.22 shows of some of these isms in the notation of IRL, which re- gards all these schools of philosophy as of historical interest only, for they lack a gnostic foundation and ontological framework. The first eight, taken in pairs, are examples of either- or conflicting positions. As explained in Part I, the italicized class and attribute names are part of the epistemological layer of the foundations, providing knowledge about knowledge or me- taknowledge, the attribute names providing knowledge itself. Name and Definition are the identifying and defining attributes, respectively. Other attributes could be principal adherents of each ism and the periods when they were prevalent. And as so often happens with the analytical mind, many of these different schools of philosophy can be further divided using various nuances of meaning. 982 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Class Schools of philosophy name Attribute Name Definition name Rationalism Reason is the chief source and test of knowledge. Empiricism All knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense experience. The ideal or the spiritual plays the central role of in the interpretation of Idealism experience. Materialism The basic substance of the world is matter. The real being of universals is denied on the ground that the use of a general Nominalism word (e.g., humanity) does not imply the existence of a general thing named by it. Objects of knowledge exist independently of whether anyone is perceiving Attribute Realism or thinking about them. value Scepticism Nothing can be known with complete or adequate certainty. A way of thinking and reasoning based upon principles that have not been Dogmatism tested by reflection or experience. Human beings are particular and individual, existing in the world, not Existentialism manifestations of an absolute or infinite substance. Propositions about material objects are reducible to propositions about Phenomenalism actual and possible sensations, or sense data, or appearances. All knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the ‘positive’ data of Positivism experience, denying any transcendental reality. Table 11.22: Some schools of modern philosophy as a relation As a result of all this argument and conflict, philosophers have thus constantly been putting themselves in labelled boxes, like strait jackets, unable to discover that their True Nature is Wholeness, without any borders or divisions anywhere. Nevertheless, despite all this confusion, philosophy has not just been an esoteric game played by philosophers. In some important respects, the philosophers have had a major influence in the world at large, not the least in politics and economics. For they have been wrestling with questions that affect us all, questions that can only be satisfactorily answered with the context of panosophy at the Ome- ga point of evolution. So in the remainder of this subsection, let us briefly look at how some of these issues are handled by Integral Relational Logic, as the coherent framework for the Unified Relationships Theory, the complete integration of all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times. In this way, we can begin to develop an integral philosophy, or rather integral history of philosophy, for when science and religion become one, as they do in panosophy, philosophy, as a separate discipline, disappears. CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 983 We can most easily begin with Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who was clearly closer to Wholeness than any of the great philosophers of modern times, apart perhaps from Hegel. It is therefore not surprising that “Spinoza was much deplored in his own times,” as Anthony Quinton tells us.1076 And as Bertrand Russell says in his idiosyncratic way, “Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers … As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wicked- ness.”1077 Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, where his Jewish parents had sought religious freedom after been expelled from Portugal, after the Inquisition had compelled them to embrace Christianity.1078 In turn, at the age of twenty-four, Spinoza rebelled against religious orthodoxy and was excommunicated by the Jewish authorities.1079 Although Spinoza was clearly thinking within the overall context of Wholeness, he did not begin the exposition of his philosophy with the Absolute, with the Datum of the Universe, ‘that which is given’. Rather, he modelled his philosophy on Euclid’s The Elements with definitions, axioms, postulates, propositions, corollaries, and lemmas. Each proof ended with the initials Q.E.D. Quod erat demonstrandum, ‘which was to be demonstrated’, as if he were proving a geometric theorem. To give you a feeling for his style, here is Definition VI: “By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality”.1080 From this definition and the axioms, he ‘proved’ a number of propositions about God, such as Proposition XVIII: “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.”1081 But to understand Spinoza’s worldview, it does not really help to follow his deductive reasoning. It is easier to stand back and look at the whole, as the commentators do. For instance, Quinton says that Spinoza had a “vision of the world as an absolutely unitary entity, any division of which … is a mutilation, embodying some kind of misunderstanding.” Spinoza thus makes no distinction between God and the physical universe, thereby ending the war between science and religion. He is thus an all-inclusive pantheist, correctly recognizing that a personal God does not exist, that the soul is not immortal, and that human beings do not have free will as separate beings.1082 As a consequence, he has a very advanced, psychotherapeutic view of freedom: knowing ourselves, understanding what causes us to behave in the way we do, is, in itself, liberating, for “it puts you at one with yourself,” able to accept ‘what is’, free from rage and frustration,1083 a healthy approach to life often taught by spiritual teachers within the human potential movement. Despite Spinoza’s holistic vision, analytical philosophers have labelled him a ‘rationalist’, along with Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who we must now consider. Like Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz was a system builder, most famous, in this respect, for his monadology. To Leibniz, a monad is a basic building block, a single, indivisible, elementary unit, denoting ‘substance’, literally ‘that which stands under’. Monads are infinitely 984 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY numerous. “They do not occupy space but are unextended spiritual things. … God is a monad; so is each human soul; so are all the ultimate constituents of the world.”1084 But curiously, “no two monads can ever have any causal relation to each other,” as Bertrand Russell, a leading authority on Leibniz tells us. Monads are ‘windowless’, as Leibniz expressed it.1085 Even though Leibniz’s monadology establishes Spirit as prior to the materialistic world, the lack of relationships between monads is a violation of the universal principle that all beings in the Universe are related to all other beings in some way or other. This approach thus seems to lead to an evolutionary dead-end, for no philosopher since seems to have taken up this idea. Nevertheless, the principle that we need a basic building block to develop a coherent view of the Totality of Existence is sound. But this basic element is not a monad, a subatomic particle, or any other of the many proposals that have been made through the ages. As we showed in Chapter 1, we can use Aristotle’s ontological concept of being to integrate all knowledge into a coherent whole. In terms of the theory of knowledge, which long preoccupied philosophers, Leibniz made an important distinction between two types of proposition: truths of reason and truths of fact, called analytic and synthetic propositions, respectively. An example of the first is “All the bachelors in England are unmarried.” Here the predicate is merely a reformulation of the defining attribute of the subject. But in statements of fact, this is not so. For instance, if one says, “There’s a monkey in the next room,” the only way to find out if this is true is to go and have a look.1086 Kant was to further refine this distinction, as we look at later. Leibniz’s monadology and epistemology led him to take the metaphysical proofs of God’s existence to their final form. There were four in number: (1) the ontological argument, (2) the cosmological argument, (3) the argument from eternal truths, and (4) the argument from pre-established harmony.1087 To Leibniz, only God necessarily exists; everything else that exists is contingent on the existence of God.1088 For Leibniz, as a Lutheran, God was a Christian God, unlike Spinoza’s atheistic view of the Absolute. And as such, God is perfect, a notion that he also attributed to the monads in his system, using Aristotle’s term entelechy, from the Greek en- ‘in’, telos ‘perfection, completion’, and ekhein ‘to have’. This led Leibniz, as an adherent of the Law of Contradiction, to take a very optimistic view of the world, famously saying, “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” a notion that Voltaire ridiculed in Candide through the philosopher Pangloss. In Victorian times, the idealist philosopher, Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), further refuted this statement when he said, “This is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.”1089 Bradley was an exception to the British empirical tradition, represented by John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776), to whom we must now turn. Locke was one of the most influential of all philosophers, generally credited with CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 985 laying down the foundation both of liberal democracy and modern empirical philosophy. His general approach was guided by this message: “Don’t blindly follow convention or authority. Look at the facts and think for yourself.” Given today’s education system, governed by the tyranny of both the democratic majority and the banking minority, such a liberating approach is virtually impossible to put into practice. It is curious that the freer we think we have become, the more trapped we find ourselves. To a great extent, this incarceration has arisen through the great success of materialistic, mechanistic science, which was just emerging in Locke’s time. Having refuted external authorities, Locke needed a source of authority for his philosophy, which he found in the physical senses. He was much influenced in this approach by the chemist Robert Boyle (1627– 1691) and Isaac Newton, with whom he had a close relationship for a time.1090 So for Locke, “the senses themselves are basic or fundamental faculties which deliver knowledge in their own right, what he calls ‘sensitive knowledge’.”1091 In this respect, Locke took a somewhat different view from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who thought that the only intelligible view of the world is a materialistic one because all our knowledge and understanding is dependent on the senses. However, as Michael Ayers tells us, Locke thought that although the senses give us knowledge, this knowledge is limited. “Be- cause all our thought about the world is restricted to the concepts that we have acquired through the senses, … he thought that there was no method by which scientists could expect to arrive at the underlying nature of things.”1092 This thought had a profound effect on New- ton, which led him to introduce a number of philosophical passages in the second edition of Principia. In Magee’s words, “what Newtonian science is giving an account of is not the inner nature of things … but simply how they behave.”1093 So although philosophy was moving further and further away from its mystical origins, the break was not yet complete. Locke still had a sense of the original meanings of nature and physics, which today has almost been completely lost. What this meant in human terms is that no one can understand what it truly means to be a human being in contrast to machines. It is impossible for us to obey the Greek maxim, “Know thyself.” For, in Locke’s philosophy, our inner nature, essence, or soul is forever unknown to us. Furthermore, lacking gnostic experience, Locke did not think that we human beings have a Divine Essence that we all share, called Love in this book, for God is Love. Nev- ertheless, in a material world in continual flux, Locke thought that personal identity is determined by the soul, which being immaterial and unextended is indestructible and immortal. And it is this soul that receives reward or punishment after death of the body. And this can only make sense if the soul remembers everything that happened to it when the individual was alive. What really matters is therefore not the supposed immaterial soul, but the unity or continuity of consciousness.1094 Memory is thus key to personal identity, leading people to 986 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY be burdened by the past as we grow and develop, until we learn to become free of our subconscious habits. Locke’s epistemology was to have a profound effect on his philosophy of ethics, which he regarded as a part of politics. This is well expressed in his own words: For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns, or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men’s opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of actions and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.1095 So Locke’s political philosophy is based not only on a clarion call for tolerance but also on the principle that people should be given the time to spend on thinking things out for themselves as far as possible. For in Locke’s individualistic view of knowledge, “Nobody else can do my knowing for me. In order to have knowledge, rather then borrowed opinion, I have to think things out for myself.” This recipe for a tolerant society, not based on external authority, was to lead to the democratic societies we know today. To quote The Encyclopaedia of Phi- losophy, “Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the French Encyclopaedists found in Locke the philosophical, political, educational, and moral basis that enabled them to propose and advance ideas which eventuated in the French Revolution. In America, his influence on Jona- than Edwards, Hamilton, and Jefferson was decisive.”1096 I have in mind here Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Russell, Ayer, and Wittgenstein, the last few taking philosophy far away from Reality, a clear reflection on how Western civilization has lost its way. But there seems to be little point in following the evolution of modern philsophy any further, as it, too, just leads us into an evolutionary dead end.

The birth of capitalism Following the success of the materialistic, mechanistic Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came the materialistic economic machine of capitalism and its materialistic antidote communism. For any system of governance reflects the prevailing worldview and levels of consciousness of the population at large. If we wish to change the way that we manage our business affairs, we first need to change within. It is thus vitally important to remember that the great ecological, economic, and social crisis we face today is psychospiritual in origin. Having said this, is there really any point in tracing the birth and evolution of capitalism, as I had intended in this final subsection of this very long chapter? To do so is just as burden- some as reviewing the work of the philosophers and scientists, living in a world very far removed from Reality. It is the invention of the stored-program computer, as a mechanistic CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 987 extension of the mind, that proves the lie of the prevailing worldview in the Information So- ciety we live in today. It is thus if and only if we can stop behaving like human automata, blindly following the herd, that we can return Home to Paradise before the human race becomes extinct. So let us pause here and see how evolution and involution might possibly help us come to terms with the human predicament with joy and laughter.